Several people in my not Cannonball Read book community recommended Audrey Faye’s Ghost Mountain Wolf Shifter Series. I grabbed the first one from Kindle Unlimited and, as I do, opened it to read the first couple of pages. And then I kept going and read until 5 am. I immediately downloaded the rest of the series. Which may have been a mistake, but seriously, this series is a soft therapy session and pure comfort. While I was reading the series, there were a number of unrelated and unconnected conversations going on around me. What seemed to me to be the common thread in these conversations was empathy – the need for more of and what looks like a concerted effort to discourage it. This series is all about empathy and the way it can lead to healing and better communities.
I am currently in the process of reading the nine book series, but I realized I have something to say now. I’ll leave the rest for a series wrap up at some point. Shifter focused series are generally not my favorite subset of urban (or in this case rural) fantasy. Like gangsters, motorcycle clubs, and rock stars, there are plenty of authors and readers who use the tropes around shifters to indulge in toxic gender stereotypes and present abuse as romance. There are also authors who play in those subgenres to examine and thoughtfully consider gender roles. Audrey Faye murders toxic ideas about gender roles right at the beginning of the first book, Alpha, and then spends the rest of the series healing the shifter pack and building a healthier society. While there are romances within the series, this is not a romance series.
At the beginning of the series, Lissa is prepared to die to protect her son from the pack alpha, who plans to kill him. Hayden, Kel, and Rio, three vacationing shifters, intervene. When Hayden kills Samuel, he becomes the pack alpha. This is the point at which Ghost Mountain Wolf Shifters stops being like most other shifter series. Instead of a good man replacing a bad man to be the pack dominant, Hayden gives the pack space to fix itself. Dominant and submissive become personality characteristics, not roles (also not sexual). A pyramid of hierarchy and entitlement becomes a circle of cooperation and support.
Under the “leadership of Samuel and his selected group of dominants, the pack was isolated and reduced in number. Anyone who didn’t fit Samuel’s idea of his pack was killed or driven away. Other pack members fled to the surrounding forest. As the pack heals, it opens up, welcoming back pack members forced out and rebuilding ties with neighbors and the wider shifter world. As the pack opens up, the number of point of view characters increases. As readers we gradually see the many dimensions of trauma left in Samuel’s wake.
I tend to avoid shifter series where the inner animal is an excuse for bad behavior. Audrey Faye uses the inner animal in much softer ways. While Samuel had used touch abusively and coercively, Hayden, Kel and Rio encourage touch platonically as modes of healing and rebuilding pack ties. While Hayden and Lissa are considering a romance, he is careful not to allow touch to become sexual without her consent. Adults hug and cuddle children in a way the shows love and safety.
A number of the point of view characters are teens. Blessedly there are no inappropriate age gap romances implied. On occasion I was reminded of the horror I felt at Twilight’s most gag-worthy romantic pairing – between adult Jacob and newborn infant Renesmee – as grown adult men took care of the teens of all genders around them without having romantic or sexual feelings for them.
There’s a lot of comforting goodness here. The plot meanders, but I was fine with that because I need this kind of healing taking up space in my brain. The current political leadership of my state is more like Samuel than Hayden and I need a respite from hate and anger.