Willow by Amy Richie

Title: Willow

Author: Amy Richie

Series: Blood Vine #1

Genre: Young Adult, Werewolves, Fantasy, Romance

Source: Kindle

Pages: 276 pages

Rating: 1.5 stars

Available at:

Goodreads • Amazon(.com)

Blurb: (via Goodreads)

Willow has the worst luck. First she has to deal with her narcissistic foster mother, Bella; then of course there’s her horrid little sister Ivy; not to mention the pack of werewolves that belong to Bella. Now, they have to move and start a new school - again.

Just when Willow thinks things can’t get any worse, Blake shows up from a council she never knew existed to name her leader of a pack she never knew existed. How was she supposed to teach a bunch of teenagers how to be wolves when she herself hated everything about her life?

My Review:
I’ve said it before and I will say it again. There are SO few good werewolf books out there. I had read this book before reading Frost Burned and Hope(less), both of which were exceptions to this statement, however, I am sad to say that Willow by Amy Richie wasn’t. At best, it was decent.

           

Character development- This was definitely not the strong point of the novel. It is always hard when an author write a lot of key characters to develop them all properly… but here, not even the main character was developed properly. I don’t think any of them were really developed properly. Things kind of just came up when it was convenient at the time… and the relationships… I have no idea what the author was thinking. Romantically, the main character, Willow, goes through 3 guys in one or two chapters. Time wise, I think its like 48 hours in the story itself. It was confusing and ridiculous and unnecessary. The relationship between her and her sister, her and her pack, her and her friends, they were just all over he place. I don’t think the author really knew what was going on. I think she knew what she wanted plot wise, but was in too much of a rush to get to the next interesting part, and the characters and the relationships between them really paid for it.

Plot- saying that, I think it is important to say that what she laid down foundation wise for the plot was a really good idea. I like where she went with it and I liked how we discovered that certain characters weren’t who they seemed, and to such a degree that sometimes you did not see it coming. The plots outline was definitely the strongest point of the novel, but it fell short when it came to filling it up. Again, nonsense, confusing things were used. Mostly character-wise, but in a time management sense as well. The event in the book happened with a snap of your fingers and there wasn’t enough filler time that could have been used to develop the characters.

After pointing out all of this, I would like to say that everything that Amy Richie did with ‘Gage’ was outstanding. I loved his character, before and after we learned his real name. The end was a little sad (not tear jerking or anything, but in a very general sense) but all together, it wasn't a very good book. 1.5 stars.