Customer Reviews

Bitten (Women of the Otherworld, Book 1)

5 star:		(175)
4 star:		(78)
3 star:		(36)
2 star:		(26)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

A friend had been urging me for months to read Kelley Armstrong's "Bitten," the first book in the "Women of the Otherworld" series. She told me that the novel was well written and unusual, with a fresh take on the same old werewolf/shapeshifter tale. So I finally got around to reading the book and all I have to say is "WOW!" I can't think of one negative comment to make, not that I'd want to. I only have praise for this terrific read and for the author. The plot is excellent; the dialogue is at times serious, at others very funny, filled with dark humor. And it's all very believable - if you believe in werewolves, of course.

Elena Michaels is a young, attractive, athletic journalist who lives in Toronto, Canada with her older lover, Philip, an architect. He is very serious about her and wants to marry her. Elena thinks she might care for him enough to marry him, except for one problem. Elena is a werewolf. As a matter of fact she is the only female werewolf...in the entire world. The werewolf gene has always been passed down from father to son - never to daughter. Almost all females bitten by werewolves have died before their bodies could adapt to the change. Elena's body adapted, which is more than can be said about her mind. She almost lost it for an entire year after her transformation. Then she finally accepted her fate. But she couldn't accept the betrayal, the bite, that made her other than human.

Ms. Armstrong's werewolves live in packs. They do not kill human beings. Those who choose the life of a loner, eschewing the pack, are called mutts. They are not to be trusted because they can become very violent, unpredictable, and sometimes kill people, just for the love of the kill. Therefore a special pack, the one Elena belonged to, tracks and monitors the mutts, worldwide.

Elena left her pack over a year before and is trying to make it on her own in the big city. However, the wild still calls to her and exerts a powerful pull. When a serious problem arises, Elena is called home to her pack's large forest estate in upstate New York, to assist them in their need. Then the real adventures, struggles and romance begin.

Ms. Armstrong's characters are marvelous. Elena is a feminist and holds her own among the males. She gives as good as she gets. She is sassy, cynical, realistic, good in combat, but inside she's about as tough as a marshmallow. The other characters are every bit as strong and complex. Their lives and histories unfold as you read. And there's a wonderful sense of comaraderie and caring among the pack. After you finish the book, you will care about them too. I have already ordered the next two books in the series: "Stolen" and "Dime Store Magic." This is a real find! Very highly recommended!
JANA

Bitten is a terrific debut novel, and a great werewolf tale that sucks you in and keeps your attention. I'm a fan of Laurell K Hamilton, but Bitten gave me a new appreciation for the limitations of the lycanthrope portrayals in the Anita Blake series. Perhaps it's to be expected, since so many creatures and monsters exist in Anita's world, no one group can be fully developed and explored. One of my difficulties with Anita's tales is that it's hard to focus sometimes. She careens from one problem to the next so quickly you barely have time to assimilate the differences between the monstrous groups she's dealing with.

That problem doesn't exist in Bitten. To the contrary, Bitten is so focused on the werewolves, and on one small group of them in particular, you are able to get much more involved with them, their lives, their struggles. One of the things I really enjoyed about Bitten was Ms. Armstrong's attention to detail, including emotional detail. All of the characters rang true to me in their reactions and dealings with each other.

Elena is a wonderful character. She's not always likable, but she's real. She is a reluctant werewolf who just longs to be human, and her uncertainty and anger at her situation are palpable. It's a miracle she functions as well as she does in the human world, though we actually see her less there than you realize at first. Despite her longing to be human, she revels in her wolf characteristics and is continually troubled by the duality of her nature. She tries to delude herself, but she's rarely successful and I respected that even when I didn't particularly like her actions at times.

I appreciated the nature of the relationship between her and Clayton, the werewolf who bit her and still wants her, despite Elena's continued resentment toward him. Their bond is fascinating and multi-faceted -- in many ways they are reflections of each other. I was happy with the initial resolution of their conflict and hope to see more of them. Likewise, the relationships between Elena and Jeremy, and Clayton and Jeremy are well-drawn and fully realized. Antonio and Nick suffer a bit by comparison, but their roles are lesser, so it's not a fatal flaw. Philip was weak too, but I suppose he had to be.

I was very pleasantly surprised by Bitten and hope that it is the first of a series which will expand on the well-crafted themes and give us new insights into the absorbing characters. Great job, Ms. Armstrong!

Bitten is one of the best first novels I have read in a long time. Kelley Armstrong proves that you can still take an old, tired and overused storyline and make it great and entertaining. Her book is sexy, intelligently written and highly entertaining.

Elena is a young woman who was once bitten by a werewolf, which inevitably turned her into one as well. Only problem is that in Armstrong's world, only males are allowed to be werwolves as the curse is passed down through the male line. But she survives the change and The Pack, an organized group of werwolves, decide to keep her alive.

She does not like her life as much as she ought to and so she escapes to Toronto, only to be brought back to her New York dwellings (the home of The Pack) when strange murders start occuring. She is quickly thrown into a plot involving a group of Mutts (werewolves who are not part of The Pack and who only want to cause trouble for the organization) who only wants to see The Pack disappear.

Violent, dark and often wittingly funny, Bitten is a very original novel that takes the werewolf legend and plays with it amazingly well. The book reminded me of the early efforts from Anne Rice; Armstrong, just like Rice did with vampires, rejuvinates the legend on her own, putting a much-needed life back into the genre.

Any fans of the genre should be pleased with this book. And non-horror fans will also find something to like here; Armstrong's prose is very beautiful, straight to the point and extremely colorful. This one is not to be missed!

Elena is the only female werewolf in existence. She didn't willingly become one, nor does she accept it. She wants to live a nice normal life after spending her youth in foster homes with uncaring or abusive people. She thinks that she has escaped the Pack and all it represents with the new love of her life, Phillip, when the alpha, Jeremy, calls her and asks for her help. A non pack werewolf or mutt is killing humans around Jeremy's estate, and he doesn't want the Pack to be exposed. Elena goes home to help. While there, she must come to terms with her werewolf status and her first love, who betrayed her and turned her into what she is.

This is the best and fastest moving werewolf novel I have ever read. It seemed to be over much too soon, and I found myself wishing it was longer, even though it cost me a good part of my night's sleep. I can't wait for the sequel.

Elena seems a normal young woman. She has a job, and lives with her perfectly normal boyfriend. However, things aren't always what they seem to be: Elena is a werewolf, the only female werewolf in the world to be precise...

Elena was turned into a werewolf by her previous fiancée, Clay, who wanted her to be with him forever, and thus did something forbidden by Pack Law: he bit her. Against all odds Elena survived, but she felt betrayed by Clay and ultimately left the Pack.

Now, however, the Pack needs her: a band of mutts (not Pack werewolves) are killing humans, and they must be stopped. So when Jeremy the alpha werewolf calls her, she decides to return and face her past, even though she isn't specially eager to do so.

Truth to be told, this is the first book by Kelley Armstrong that I have read, and I discovered it by chance. A friend told me to visit Armstrong's website (www.kelleyarmstrong.com) to read some of her free novellas, and I did exactly that when I had some free time. I didn't regret it: the three free novellas that Kelley offers in her website are just awesome. "Ascension", "Savage" and "Beginnings" are prequels to "Bitten", and quite different to other things I have read (different in a good way, though).

My immediate reaction after reading Armstrong's free novellas was to buy "Bitten", Armstrong's first published novel and coincidently the first book in the "Women of the Otherworld" series. I'm pretty happy I did that. As a matter of fact, I liked this book so much that I gladly recommend it to you, provided you like fantasy/horror books with non-stopping action, an interesting plot and a little bit of romance :)

Belen Alcat

Finished Kelley Armstrong's Bitten this morning. It was a wonderful book; I can't believe it was her first. I was very skeptical of the whole 'modern day werewolves' theme, to be honest, but damned if she didn't pull it off nicely, telling us a riveting story while giving us glimpses into the whole werewolf mystique and leaving room for many more stories to come (I hope).

Overall she kept a tight leash on things (yes, pun intended) until the very last parts of the story where she got a little careless about leaving bodies behind, so to speak. This is forgivable in that the reader is so caught up in things by then that they're probably just as happy to not have to pause for the explanation of how a fight scene is cleaned up. Ideally, though, we wouldn't be left with questions of "What will the police think when they find...." and so forth.

That's a minor nit, though. The story moved along really nicely; a real page turner. Elena is a believable modern day heroine. She's got flaws and she has some very dense moments (perhaps a few too many -- several times I was shouting the Bitten equivalent of "DON'T GO IN THE BASEMENT!") but she's still likable and a very sympathetic character.

I'm looking forward to reading more from Ms. Armstrong.

Bitten drew me in a kept me reading until the end, and after I was finished I put the book down, and never picked it up again. The characters are briefly memorable, some of whom have very drawing personalities (Jeremy and Clay, being the two prime examples), one of which is not the main character. Elena, the only female werewolf, was annoying and whiney and the only thing keeping me reading was to see how things ended up with the characters I actually liked.

The book is not badly written, but the author takes a unique look into the world of werewolves (presenting the story with the only living female, turning werewolves not into mutaed half man half beast creatures, but large, beautiful wolves- a factor I did enjoy greatly) and then fails to embelish on anything but her awkward character relationships and somewhat foolish and arrogant plotline. As a main example of this: Elena is the only female werewolf. This in itself could make an interesting story, but alas Armstrong spends only a couple pages explaining its signifigance, and never really returns to it again.

Overall, the book is just too choppy and generic to be anything more than another passable fantasy book, mostly appealing for teenage girls.

I have to admit that I was skeptical when I first picked this book up, having had it up to the gills with the likes of Anne Rice and Laurell K Hamilton. But it proved itself to be something new - a brilliant alternate reality style novel, that doesn't rely on magic and mystical smoke screens to give it a storyline. I couldn't put it down.

Elena is a werewolf. Not hereditary, but bitten and turned against her will. Shunning the pack that adopted her, she leads an almost normal human life - until a vicious struggle between her werewolf family and a growing pack of mutts threatens to tear her world apart once again. With loyalties divided, and a debt to pay, she must make choices that will change the course of her life irrevocably.

This book is vividly well-written and doesn't slow down for a moment. The personalities and human behaviours are very real. There is also an interesting veiw into the psyche of a woman, damaged in childhood, who uses her own nature to deny what she is. This book is a study in coming to terms with self, and understand that we make who we are - we are not made.

I give this five stars. It's very rare that I find a book like this one, and I am eagerly awaiting the moment I get my hands on the second in the series.

This review pertains to the whole series, rather than solely to Bitten.

Pros:
* Good writing
* Likeable characters
* Generally well-plotted

Cons:
* Every book has at least one attempted rape, or rape theme (Haunted has a particularly awful scene featuring a raped pre-teen begging for her mother--that's not the kind of thing I read for entertainment. That scene actually stayed with me for a couple of weeks, and led me to stop reading the series. On the other hand, I suppose it was vividly written.)
* Pretty gory--if you like horror it probably won't bother you. It got to be too much for me.


Depends on your point of view:
* Lengthy, detailed sex scenes (these might have been more fun to read if I hadn't usually been trying to rock my baby to sleep at the same time).
* Not very much humor. The books take themselves pretty seriously.

Not going to give the synopsis, you can gather that from other reviews or the editorial....

Armstrong is a very talented writer and I enjoyed the world she created, though I had some major issues with this book.

I really really really really tried to like the main character, Elena and tried to empathize with her but she really had no redeeming qualities. Such as her constant need to rebel and assert her independence but it was all thoughtless, the instances when she should have been standing up for herself she became docile and the times she should have followed the rules she did not. Did she learn from this you might ask? Not at all, she kept up her reckless behavior to the very end. She was whiny, immature, dishonest, deluded, reckless, careless, short-sighted, etc. It also seemed to send this message of the good woman should listen to the men because she's completely incapable of doing anything on her own...what's up with that?

I am curious as to why, granted this is an urban and more modern era story, there are only 35 werewolves in the world and Elena is the only female.... Huh? That part I didn't buy at all. I also wondered how the Pack managed to cut off all contact with infant male werewolf's mother without problems from said mother, that was never really explained either.

There were quite a few unanswered questions that would have made the book a lot better and more complete, such as more specific and detail information surrounding Clay and Elena's relationship, more information and specifics about Elena's life in college, prior to college and such, you really don't know her very well. The impression I got from Elena's and Clay's relationship was that it was unhealthy. It was built on a foundation of lies and mistrust from the picture painted, we didn't get enough glimpses into their past before she was bitten to see how it was before. How did they meet? Considering she was abused, didn't Clay have to overcome her trust issues? How did that play out? Clay in almost every sexual experience we saw the two in practically rapes Elena, those issues should have been dealt with. I mean you are trying to get people to "buy into" the story, give us something to work with.

There was this conflicting picture of someone abused during childhood, then she was this happy passive person when her and Clay met. I was also thrown when the author threw in that line about her foster parents not being complete ogres and them having some sort of Christmas traditions, okay correct me if I'm wrong but what would you call it when a foster parent sexually abuses a child and the other parent knows it's happening and chooses to ignore it? Regardless of any Christmas tradition, they are worse than ogres. I also think she glossed over, if not completely ignored, the issues of childhood sexual abuse. It really made me question the author's insight and authority of writing on the subject or even interjecting it into the story. I thought at some point those issues should have been addressed beyond Elena mentally separating her body 'ME' from her spiritual/mental 'ME'. Childhood abuse manifests itself in horrendous way that effects a person all the way into adulthood and nothing was ever mentioned with how Elena dealt with that.

It was very hard to identify with her on any level. The beginning was a good start but it did not build well and it ultimately had a very disappointing end. I was very saddened that the all of the major issues of the book, issues that were present throughout the entire book mind you, were wrapped up in the last six or pages. I thought that it was a cheap and easy way out. I think I would have liked it better if Elena had took off on her own away from everyone and went on a journey to find herself and get some perspective, because she was just as lost at the end as she was at the beginning.

Needless to say I was extremely disappointed at the direction the book took but hey "to each its own". This is my first and last "Women of the Otherworld" novel.