Review: Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn

Author: Carrie Vaughn

Title: Kitty and the Midnight Hour

Series: Kitty Norville #1

About the Book: Kitty Norville is a midnight-shift DJ for a Denver radio station - and a werewolf in the closet. Her new late-night advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged is a raging success, but it's Kitty who can use some help. With one sexy werewolf-hunter and a few homicidal undead on her tail, Kitty may have bitten off more than she can chew?

My Thoughts:

The last 25% of the book is a massive improvement over the first 75% of the book, in my opinion, and major reason I've rated this book as 'good' (3 stars) instead of 'didn't like it' (2 stars). I also think that my feelings about this book have to do in large part with my own expectations gone wrong.

What I Expected:

Before starting this book I'd heard it was about submissive werewolf. That had me majorly excited because in all the werewolf fiction I've come across, dominant, not submissive wolves are the subject. You come across an outlier once awhile, like Anna in Patricia Briggs' Alpha and Omega series, but they ae usually dominant wolves in some weird/different incarnation (like Anna is) or dominant wolves whoa re dormant and waiting for the right time to strike. I wanted to read this book because I thought it would be fun to see an imagined werewolf society through a submissive wolf's perspective. I was also excited because not every strong person is 'kickass', or 'take-charge', or dominant. That paradigm shows us only one side of strength and forces our expectations of what strength should be inside a box (okay soapbox over...I think).


Well, anyway, that is what I expected, not what I got.

What I got:

1. A HELLA whiny heroine. And by that I mean HELLA whiny! Whining in both wolf and human forms, cowering all the time, all over the place. If I had to desrcibe her in one word, it would be whiny, with 'HELLA' in brackets and capitals attached before.

2. NOT a healthy description of a person or a wolf pack. In Kitty's pack instead of being protectors, the dominant wolves seem to be walking abusers, preying on anything weaker than themselves, ans walking man-whores too (no wonder most werewolf mythologies have them as immune to almost everything. They'd all have died from STD's by now if that wasn't the case!) Most of them were asshats. They were more like sadists than a pack of werewolves.

3. A HELLA whiny heroine. She was not a healthy person. As I was reading, I couldn't help thinking over and over again that 'this is NOT what a healthy depiction of a submissive person/werewolf should be!', and 'this is NOT what a healthy werewolf packs should be!

*As the story went on, I liked Kitty less and less, most of that being the way she acted on her talk show. I don't know if she was meant to be a shock jock or something, but I thought the way she spoke to most people was quite rude and uncalled for. I don't like that.

By the end, the writing had gotten really better, but through some unbelievably fake machinations (to me at least), our heroine sorta comes into her own, and discovers that mebbe she isn't really submissive after all. She is growing up; she has more spine; she is probably more dominant than she thought she was. I felt that was a cop-out. She's basically your generic 'kickass, talk-smack' UF heroine, only quite watered down, and slightly gentler. Eh whatever.

Thus I was disappointed in this here story. It was a good case of wrong expectation, but I also think it was a good case of wrong execution too. Even though I enjoyed the last parts of the story much more than I expected, I don't think I will come along for the ride.

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES: