Ugh. OK. This one was a little rough. It was such a good concept, but it was sooooo slow. I think the audiobook was about 20-21 hours. It probably could’ve been 10 and it would’ve been better.
The premise is that some people in the world are werewolves. They were “infected” with a prion originated in wolves. I nerdily enjoyed the backstory of the disease. I could’ve listened to more about that!
It starts out strong too. Patrick Gamble is on a plane flying to a different state (Oregon?) to live with his mom while his dad goes to the Lupine Republic to fight for the National Guard. So far so good. On the flight a man goes into the bathroom and shifts into a werewolf and basically eats through the entire passenger list. Patrick survives by hiding under a dead body. The plane lands and ushers in a new world where formerly tolerated Lycans are mostly all presumed to be terrorists.
There are definitely some Lycan terrorists, but the majority of Lycans are just normal “people” living their lives. We also meet Claire when the shadowy government guys come to talk to her parents who end up getting accidentally murdered. Patrick and Claire meet up eventually and their stories are intertwined throughout the book.
There were a lot of things I loved. The ENTIRE plane scene was gripping and horrific. The “scientific” stuff was good. Prions are real (think mad cow disease), but as far as we know there’s no lupine prion that turns you into a werewolf. I liked the relationships that developed between the characters. There were just SO MANY WORDS. And I just read a review on goodreads that summed up how I feel about this book. There are a lot of CLIFFHANGERS! You’ll be all into the action, build up, excitement, then like an R.L. Stine novel for kids, we move on to another scene. You can do this if your other scenes are riveting too, but not ALLL THE TIME. It can’t be the only way you write. As this reviewer said, the cliffhanger is then wrapped up in a paragraph or so with exposition. We don’t see how the scene played out, we just get the cliffs notes. This is where the words should be used! We get too many wasted words. I’d give this 2.5 stars because of how much it annoyed me.