An unsteady first entry to a series I'll likely continue and that I expect will enjoy the later entries more. If nothing else, I can pat myself on the back for pushing through a premise that initially had me feeling pretty uncomfortable.

Fantasy is my "maybe this time I'll like it!" genre. From fully-fictional worlds with paragraphs of background exposition to only slightly-incredible magical realism, it never really sticks for me, but I think this is the closest I've gotten to enjoying it in a long while. Basically we have here a setting where 1) werewolves are real and 2) magic is real, but we learn this as readers at the same steady pace as our mundane protagonist does. So far so good.

And really the paranormal aspects really just serve as a vehicle to drive home on the themes of family, loyalty/betrayal, and self-worth. And boy are those themes hammered on! While I appreciate (and even enjoyed) how characters in this book end up in painful arguments and disagreements with each other even though neither side wanted to fight about it, many scenes felt repetitive because one person or another just could not let go of a slight they had suffered at the hands of another. It wasn't often, but there were times when I thought to myself, "oh wow, they're still fighting about this..."

The prose also is a little repetitive and tends to favor very short sentences during emotional moments that I could've done without, and I'm just gonna say it: I felt weird about the age gap between the two romantic leads. They first meet when one is 16 and the other is 10, and the younger one maintains a possessive fixation towards the protagonist that is meant to be chalked up to his uncontrollable animalistic urges (remember the whole werewolf thing?), but it rubbed me the wrong way.

Still, the Found Family trope is pulled off well here, and I enjoyed the large cast of background characters. And learning that successive books in this series follow the perspectives of minor characters from this first entry is a plus and not a minus for me.