Book review: Bitten by Kelley Armstrong (Women of the Otherworld 1)

I had looked at this book series at the bookstore several times in the last few years, but was never really interested enough to buy and read Bitten. It didn't help that I had trouble determining what the first book in the series actually was, seeing as the covers don't say. But when people at work recommended it to me, I decided to give it a try.

Our main character is Elena Michaels, a werewolf in hiding in Toronto. She tries to live a normal life as a journalist, while living with her boyfriend--who of course doesn't know anything about her furry side. This is tricky for a lot of reasons, ranging from simple (she requires a lot more food than a normal person would) to more complicated (having to slip out at night to change form and run around the city as a wolf). In addition to being a supernatural creature in a normal world, she's also the only female werewolf. In the world. This is because the genetic mutation is passed down on the father's side, and only to sons; being bitten by a werewolf infects the person bitten, but the process is so violent and painful that the new wolf rarely survives.

I found the premise interesting enough; and the plot gets going relatively quickly with Elena's former pack leader calling her for help. Elena's character was a little grating sometimes. I know that the struggle to accept oneself is pretty standard for supernatural stories, but in this case it's sort of obnoxious because Elena has very clearly already embraced her werewolf nature. She enjoys her wolf form; she talks about killing with little remorse; she slips easily back into Pack life. Her desire for a normal human life seems at odds with how she actually feels.

The actual action of the book takes a while to get going, despite being set into motion early. The head of the Pack (always capitalized), Jeremy, has called Elena to help the Pack track down a non-Pack member, a Mutt, who is killing humans in the area where the Pack lives. Although this storyline does start very early in the book, it also takes a long time to unfold. I got frustrated at times and would put it down to read other things. I think this is partially a result of this being a first book in the series, which naturally requires a lot of exposition to explain how Elena became a wolf, her relationship with other Pack members, her life pre-wolfing, etc. It's normal to need this in a first book, of course, but it makes me wonder what the other books in the series will be like, seeing as the narrator changes, so the third book will require all that exposition again from the new narrator.

Overall, I enjoyed the book enough to continue reading the series, but it's not at the top of my list.