Beast Within

Nightshade


Written by: Andrea Cremer

Released: October 19, 2010 by Philomel

Summary: Calla Tor has always known her destiny: After graduating from the Mountain School, she'll be the mate of sexy alpha wolf Ren Laroche and fight with him, side by side, ruling their pack and guarding sacred sites for the Keepers. But when she violates her masters' laws by saving a beautiful human boy out for a hike, Calla begins to question her fate, her existence, and the very essence of the world she has known. By following her heart, she might lose everything— including her own life. Is forbidden love worth the ultimate sacrifice?

I heard about this way back last spring when people were reading the ARC and blogging about how great it was. In fact, I remember reading on Rachel Vincent’s blog that she was reading/had finished reading it and that she enjoyed it. Right then and there I knew that I desperately wanted to read it as soon as possible. But then once I got it, they hype had sort of set me off and it took me a while to finally get around to picking it up and cracking the spine.

This was a book that I went into with such high expectations that I almost stopped reading it after the first few chapters. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great book, but I just found that it took me almost ¼ of the way through in order to get into the story and the lore. To me it felt as though it too forever for things to be explained. Either that or I was so flustered over the Christmas season that I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the details.

But I digress.

This story was gripping (once I got into it) and after that I didn’t want to put it down. Which, as usual, resulted in my staying up way too late in order to finish reading it.

Calla is such a strong character who is fighting such an inner battle that I couldn’t help but empathize with her and like her. At times I did want to hit her really hard in the face, though, but I think that’s just because I wanted her to ditch Shay and go for Ren 100%. But I also understood her inner conflict between doing what was expected of her and wanting to follow her own heart and forge her own path. I think that’s what made her such a realistic character despite the werewolf business.

Which brings me to both Ren and Shay. I loved Ren and it’s not as if I didn’t like Shay, but I thought him completely volatile and bad for Calla. Still, he made me swoon with his devotion. But Ren... he just made me completely weak in the knees. So, it’s Team Ren for this blogger.

This book started a chain reaction which I can’t wait to read more about in the next novel. I thought that it was a fabulous starter book for an intriguing series of books. There’s mystery and war and love and hate. Basically there’s everything that makes a book good in the right recipe of ingredients – which this book definitely has and I can’t wait to see where it all goes next.

This is a definite 9/10 for me.

ps: Gorgeous cover!