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Anne Rice: The Wolf Gift (2012, Alfred A. Knopf) 3 stars

The novel tells the tale of Reuben Golding, a well to do journalist at the …

Review of 'The Wolf Gift' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

A young reporter escapes being mauled by a man wolf and changes into a man wolf by the moon. His own actions soon result in a horde of police and scientists seeking him out, along with others like him...

I wanted to like this book, but I couldn't. My first problem was that I didn’t care about the main character at all. Reuben is 23 years old and works as a reporter. He talks like a 45-year-old philosophy major and having sex with women who aren’t his girlfriend; he is a bland character with no real traits. The rest of the characters are thin. That Reuben’s girlfriend is a lawyer or his mother is a doctor may seem interesting, but their careers define them a lot. All the rest are pretty interchangeable.

As for the writing, it is not stellar either. Besides being clunky, it’s replete with info dumps.

One positive is the mythology she has created for her werewolves, the Chrism, and so on. That Reuben accepted the change and became the werewolf version of Batman also impressed me. My interest in the rest of the book did piqued, but it did not captivate me. The Wolf Gift intended the first in a series to be the climax of the story.

It just wasn't my kind of book.

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