Unleashed [Paperback]

Kristopher Reisz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 19, 2008

What lies beneath

Daniel Morning seems perfect -- handsome, charismatic, intelligent. But living up to everyone's expectations has cost him the right to make his own decisions. The urge to shatter those expectations is beginning to gnaw at his insides.

Then Daniel meets Misty. She's smoky, rebellious, tender...and much more. She decides to let him into her pack of outcasts -- and in on their little secret: She and her friends have learned to shapeshift, and have been prowling the night as wolves.

Daniel soon falls in love with the primal sensation of shifting, just as he's falling in love with Misty. The freedom to follow his most basic instincts is like nothing he's ever felt. But Daniel will slowly come to realize that such freedom comes at a price....

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up-Daniel Morning, son of working-class parents, shoulders a heavy load due to his family's high expectations. He works hard at school but his SATs aren't stellar, and his parents insist on having him classified as ADD so that he can take an untimed test to improve his score. He gets into Cornell, but it burns him knowing that he enjoyed an unfair advantage and he regrets his decision to go along with his parents' wishes. Then he meets biracial and dangerously sexy Misty, who has a tough-girl attitude that intrigues him. Very quickly they become a couple and he learns what she and her friends do in the old abandoned furnace night after night: they eat magic mushrooms and turn into wolves that roam the city, marking their territory as they go. Mesmerizingly addictive and sometimes bluntly graphic prose suits the topic perfectly, with sex and dope and shape-shifting all combining to lead readers down a path full of allegory and excitement. This novel is sure to be a word-of-mouth favorite among older teens.—Susan Riley, Mount Kisco Public Library, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Hot, wrenching, and wise, this book is fantastic!"

-- Holly Black

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Simon Pulse; Original edition (February 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416940014
• ISBN-13: 978-1416940012
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,017,776 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I grew up in Decatur, Alabama, which had three miniature golf courses and not much else.

In tenth grade, I was assigned Return of the Native in English class. A quarter of the way through Thomas Hardy's horrible, horrible masterpiece, I made my smartest decision to date: to never, ever open any book assigned in class again and spend my time reading whatever I wanted. This included plenty of X-men comics and horror novels, but I also managed to fit in some Kafka and Poe, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a healthy sampling of the Beat poets, Maus, Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Clockwork Orange among others.

While still in high school, I decided my life's ambition was to make as much money as possible without having to get up before noon. Thus, I set out to become a writer. I sold my first story to a small horror magazine for five dollars. The check bounced, and I was charged a twenty dollar service fee. Some might have taken that as a sign, but I remembered my motto, CARPE AFTERNOON, and soldiered on. Since then, I've worked as a paramedic and in a psychiatric hospital while learning to write.

I still have not finished Return of the Native.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of Teens Read Too, February 12, 2008

By 

TeensReadToo "Eat. Drink. Read. Be Merrier." (All Over the US & Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unleashed (Paperback)

Daniel Morning has a beautiful girlfriend, an early acceptance to Cornell, and the world at his fingertips. So why does he feel so trapped?

When he gets to know Misty and her friends, he realizes how much freedom lies beyond the rules and restrictions set down by his parents and teachers. Misty's group is a pack in the most literal sense of the word. At night they eat a mushroom sacred to the god of decay, and shape-shift into wolves to prowl the streets and mark their territory.

At first disturbed and disbelieving, Daniel finds himself sucked into this shadow world of magic and defiance. His grades slip and his girlfriend ditches him for another guy, but with Misty, he doesn't care. Still, he can't bring himself to tell her the truth--that despite their connection, he's planning on leaving come fall. But then the pack's activities cross over the line between conscious rebellion and wild destructive abandon, and Daniel realizes he has to make a choice: between Cornell and Misty, between safety and freedom, and between the perfect life he used to have and all the lives that now stand to be lost.

Kristopher Reisz's UNLEASHED has one of the most unique takes on an established mythology that I've ever seen. Its twist on the werewolf tales will keep readers guessing right until the end. Daniel is not always likable, but his motivations are easy to understand, and his growth throughout the story is well-developed. The descriptions of shape-shifting and being wolves are so vivid readers will wish they could experience it for themselves. It's an intense, can't-put-it-down read
that will have readers turning pages long after they should be asleep.

Highly recommended to all fans of urban fantasy and the supernatural.

Reviewed by: Lynn Crow

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When you're finished with Breaking Dawn..., July 31, 2008

By 

Teenreads.com (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unleashed (Paperback)

Are you a fan of Twilight? Cirque du Freak? Then get ready for a dark story to be unleashed on you. UNLEASHED introduces readers to a group of outcasts who become wolves and prowl the City of Birmingham at night. The book turns what you think you know about jocks and loners on its head to deliver suspense and magic.

Daniel Morning is a high school golden boy. He has his acceptance to Cornell, his hot girlfriend Angie and his pack of A-list friends. No one needs to know that a psychologist was paid to sign a letter confirming his nonexistent ADHD so he could get a better SAT score. No one needs to know that Angie is sometimes a racist and disgusts him.

Misty and Marc are used to racial insults. Being biracial in Birmingham sadly means "mutt" to some classmates like Angie, but they are proud of their heritage, including their grandfather, who marched in the city's Civil Rights Movement. They are friends with two more loners, Eric and Val, and none of them have the means to dream about Cornell or any real future beyond high school graduation in a few months. One boring night they discover an abandoned foundry that has magic mushrooms growing on its grounds. Once cooked and consumed, they turn the four friends into a pack of wolves that prowl the city.

The line between who they are as humans and as wolves begins to blur. Misty is suspended for racing out of class to help a dog hit by a car in front of the school. Daniel wonders why he just sat there while Misty was brave enough to go do something. He never tells her about Cornell and thinks that good boy life is so different that the omission wouldn't matter to her. Misty brings Daniel into the pack, and the group grows tighter as even their human forms are affected. His old friends and Angie disappear from Daniel's mind, and only the pack remains.

When a teacher slights Misty, the pack chooses to retaliate with violent destruction. It is a turning point for all of them as they decide if their human or wolf sides are more desirable. Questions about the future loom closer, and Daniel is caught further between his two worlds. When everything comes to clash, each must make decisions about who they are and what they must do to change.

UNLEASHED offers an interesting and dark twist on the question of what happens after graduation. While at first it may seem like a jock and outsider love story, the conflict builds suspense and the plot offers many surprises. This is not just another werewolf story or a high school creature of the night tale. The questions and characters will resonate with both fans of dark supernatural stories and anyone struggling to decide who they are and what the future will look like. Kristopher Reisz offers realistic emotion and choices in his second novel.

--- Reviewed by Amy Alessio

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outsiders, March 24, 2008

By 

Todd Thomas (Jamestown, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unleashed (Paperback)

I just finished the last chapter (not for the first time) and I'm puzzling again why Reisz isn't listed more often as one of the best Southern writers of his generation. His Birmingham is a bleak and dying infrastructure, enlivened by both the people that make it home and by the storied history of the place. On top of that, Reisz's word choice and sentence structure is art, both in this book and his earlier freestanding novel.

As for this book itself, I can't rave enough. Disaffected outsiders are somewhat the norm in YA books, but this one takes it to a new level. We see the top and bottom of the ugly food chain that is high school, painted in a gritty style that would evoke raw emotion in anyone that can remember those years. Reisz writes with an unflinching realism about high school life--drugs, sex, fears of the future--that doesn't underestimate or infantize his target audience.

Unleashed is thought-provoking, complex literature. Literature that I must highly recommend.