My mom and I both loved Shelly Laurenston’s Call of Crows series, and when we read the description of this book to start a new series, we both got excited. My mom rushed out and bought a copy right away, but didn’t have a chance to read it before she died a couple years ago. I rescued it from her collection before my dad could toss it and I’m so glad I did because it’s exactly what I needed.
If you’re at all familiar with Laurenston’s Call of Crows series, this one is very much in the same vein. Like the CoC series, this book has some paranormal elements, but still takes place largely in our world. Shapeshifters live among us full humans with most humans blissfully unaware and the few who learn about shifters hunt them for sport because people are the worst.
This series is very much focused on the shifter world with no mention of the Norse mythology that dominated the CoC series, but I have no doubt that the crows, ravens, owls, etc. are all still kicking butt in their own corner of the world.
Obviously shifters are part human, but they’re also part animal and they do have some qualities of the animals into which they shift. For example, wolves form attachments fairly quickly and have packs with an alpha, whereas cats have prides, but still prefer to go solo when they can.
Each animal mostly sticks to its own kind, but they can breed across animal types, in which case the children are called hybrids and are generally looked down on and not accepted by anyone.
That’s the case with Charlie and her two half-sisters. Charlie is half honey badger, half wolf. Her sister, Max (short for Maxine) is all honey badger. Stevie is half honey badger, half Siberian tiger, and when she shifts she is huge and weighs between one and two tons. Charlie is also half white, half black, Max is half white, half Asian (I think Chinese, but I can’t remember for sure), and Stevie is white.
Their dad is all honey badger and has managed to piss off pretty much everyone. The book starts with a prologue that shows the sisters as very creepy young girls who know how to work together and do whatever it takes to survive. Max’s mom is in jail and Stevie’s mom just dropped Stevie with Charlie’s mom one night and never came back. Charlie’s mom did her best to raise the three girls on her own until the night she was killed (in front of the girls), at which point the girls went to live with Charlie’s maternal grandfather in Wisconsin.
Fastforward several years, and Charlie is awoken by a team of trained and armed assassins barging into her apartment early in the morning. She gets shot in the shoulder, but manages to escape and make it to another apartment (naked, since assassins don’t have the decency to let you get dressed before they shoot you), where she kills a few of the guys coming after her. She gets lucky because the apartment in which she lands happens to be that of a world-renowned pianist and his shifter bodyguard, Berg, who kills a few more of the attackers before the rest basically run away screaming (they’re full humans and had no idea what they were up against).
Charlie doesn’t know who’s trying to kill her or why, but it doesn’t really matter. This is just another day in her life. She does know it’s time to get her sisters, because if she’s a target, so are they.
Max pulls up when Charlie is outside and on the run from her attackers, and the two of them make their way to Switzerland to get their baby sister out of her latest psychiatric facility. Stevie is “addicted” (according to her sisters) to psychiatric facilities where she both gets treatment from a host of mental illnesses (mostly anxiety and abandonment issues), and gets to play doctor. She also happens to be a genius who was at one point a musical prodigy (her dad stole all the money she made from that), at one point almost blew up an entire state until her sisters talked her down, and is now working in a field of science, although I don’t think they ever specify which field of science. It doesn’t matter.
So, upon breaking their baby sister out of the psychiatric facility, they learn their father is dead and Stevie starts to grieve while her sisters dance with joy. They just have to make their way to NYC to ID the body, only to find out…
It’s not him. Not only is he still out there somewhere, but he recently stole over a hundred million British Sterling from a relative in Scotland, and now said relative wants to use Charlie and her sisters to get their dad to give the money back. There are just two problems.
Freddy MacKilligan is a sociopath who doesn’t care what happens to his daughters (he previously sold at least one of them into slavery).
He’s an idiot who managed to get the money stolen from him as soon as he stole it. His only luck lies in his apparent nine lives (at least) given the number of times he has pissed people off without getting killed.
The Scottish relative figures, even if Freddy doesn’t care about his daughters, at the very least, maybe Charlie can talk some sense into him and convince him to give the money back. She happens to have a knack for talking sense into people and getting disparate groups to get along and work together. She does it with different factions of the shifter world by convincing them her father is a threat to all of them.
Turns out, Freddy can’t return the money, because he handed it over to a pair of Italian twins who also happen to be long-lost cousins on Freddy’s father’s side. Freddy probably doesn’t know they’re related when he works with them and they don’t even know they’re shifters until the climax of the book, so now they’re even more dangerous, which I’m sure will make for an awesome sequel.
You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned Berg since introducing him, and that’s because, while he is present throughout the book and a POV character a significant amount of the time, the romance between him and Charlie is more of a C plot. It’s there, and it’s a big reason Charlie and her sisters end up staying in NYC, but it’s far from the main focus of the book.
That said, it was kind of hard to tell what was the main focus of the book. You had Freddy messing up his daughters’ lives, a psychopathic distant cousin getting sprung from jail, another cousin’s wedding, for which Charlie was hired to keep her father from interrupting/destroying, and then there was Charlie’s budding relationship with Berg. Laurenston did manage to tie it all together by the end, but the book as a whole still felt pretty scattered.
I loved Stevie hiding in cupboards, and I loved the fact that she’s afraid of literally all her new neighbors (including Berg’s siblings, Dag and Britta) because bears eat people, and when someone points out that so do tigers, she realizes she’s afraid of herself.
Speaking of which, I loved how visual this book is. So many of the jokes were visual, and yet Laurenston never got bogged down explaining who was where or how certain things were happening. I felt like I was just watching it unfold in front of me and it made me laugh so many times.
I loved how Charlie is literally always looking out for her sisters and that, when she gets overwhelmed, she copes by baking (so do I). I also loved that all the bears started making requests for her to bake certain things. At first, she resisted being told what to bake, but when the bears started buying her fancy kitchen equipment, she kind of had to give in.