Review: Stray by Rachel Vincent

Title: Stray (Shifters #1)
Author: Rachel Vincent
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Heat Index: 3 out of 5
Release Date: June 1st, 2007
Word/Page Count: 618
Format: Purchased

There are only eight breeding female werecats left . . .
And I'm one of them.

I look like an all-American grad student. But I am a werecat, a shape-shifter, and I live in two worlds.

Despite reservations from my family and my Pride, I escaped the pressure to continue my species and carved out a normal life for myself. Until the night a Stray attacked.

I'd been warned about Strays -- werecats without a Pride, constantly on the lookout for someone like me: attractive, female, and fertile. I fought him off, but then learned two of my fellow tabbies had disappeared.

This brush with danger was all my Pride needed to summon me back . . . for my own protection. Yeah, right. But I'm no meek kitty. I'll take on whatever -- and whoever -- I have to in order to find my friends. Watch out, Strays -- 'cause I got claws, and I'm not afraid to use them . . .

Stray by Rachel Vincent provided me with a bit of a challenge. I kept wavering back and forth from really enjoying the story to hating the main character and wanting to toss the book in frustration. Faythe is a tabby shifter, one of the few female werecats left in the United States. Females are rare and, as a result, kept rather confined within the Pride. This doesn’t exactly go with what Faythe wants, which is college, a career, and a life that has a limited interaction, if any at all, with her Pride. As a result, Faythe is continually running away during her teen years until her father agrees to let her attend college and, later on, grad school. However, the same night that a female tabby turns up dead and Faythe is attacked by a werecat who lives outside the pack structure, Faythe’s father makes her return to the Pride so she can be protected until the killer is apprehended.

This is where I start to really get annoyed with Faythe. As a reader, you can completely sympathize with the situation that Faythe is in where she has little control over her life choices and, as a result, doesn’t want to give up the little bit of freedom she has managed to obtain.

However, annoyance starts to set in when Faythe stubbornly clings to the belief that everyone is against her and refuses to look at the outside situation. Her mentality is firmly stuck in the teenage angst where it’s you against the world and, for Faythe, that includes her father, brothers, and the boy she was set to marry but left at the alter. Because of this view, she seems to feel no compunction towards throwing a temper tantrum better fit for a five year old on a regular occurrence.

While I found myself regularly annoyed with Faythe’s attitude and her actions, I really liked the main characters of the novel. Even though her brothers and father were secondary, I felt they were given more depth than Faythe. Faythe’s father, in particular, is a character where you can see he’s constantly thinking, looking at life as a chess board and continually adjusting his movements to combat the moves of not only his enemies, but also his family. He actually reminds me a bit of Jack Bristow from Alias, the tv show, where he’s distanced but still very invested. He’s also a man that’s going to have his own agenda, one that you’re not always going to be privy to. I hope that future books bring a closer relationship between Faythe and her father so we’re allowed to get more of an inner view of this man.

As for the romance plotline, I was about ready to throw my hands up. Marc is the man that Faythe left at the alter and, at the beginning of the novel, you’re geared and primed to hate him. Faythe has the reader believing the Pride mentality results in female werecats being marched to the alter at gunpoint with the first guy she bats her eyelashes at as soon as she’s of legal age. You immediately jump to Marc being a bad guy.

Then you meet him.

He might have a bit of an alpha male thing going on, but who can say that’s really unique when you’re reading a shifter novel? As a reader, even going solely from Faythe’s pov, you can easily see Marc cares for Faythe and is more than willing to meet her halfway to make a relationship work. Even though Faythe still has strong feelings for him, she bites his leg down to the bone while in cat-form, flirts and makes out with another guy from the Pride who also has feelings for her though Faythe’s feelings for him are one-third lust and two-thirds anger Marc, and then gets drunk and sleeps with Marc. After which she’s about to run away again but is interrupted when she’s kidnapped. Win.

I started this book on a whim after reading three books that were borderline DNF. I managed to finish those books, but barely. I was in need for a good read and, danggit, I was determined that this book was going to be it. I was going to finish the book, no matter what. I didn’t realize when I started it that it was over 600 pages long. Not an issue, I like having a good long read. I don’t really like it when a large majority of that read is world-building information dump, where you have a conversation interrupted by a page or more of world-building info dumped on you before you can return to the conversation. By page 400, I was skimming passages of world-building just to get back to the action and get the book done.

I’ll probably end up reading the rest of the series, but I’m not really in any rush to visit Faythe’s character again. Needless to say, I’ll be going into the next book hoping it shows a large bit of character growth by our main lead.