November | 2010 | Beauty is a Sleeping Cat

Elena, heroine of Kelley Armstrong’s impressive debut thriller Bitten, never planned that a casual sexual encounter would transform her into a werewolf. Neither did Clay, her lover and one of the leaders of the exclusive werewolf clique known as the Pack; women do not generally change or survive if they do. Elena’s considerable reservations about her new life come to a head and she walks out on the Pack to return to something like normality, finding herself a boyfriend who turns a blind eye to her occasional disappearances in the middle of the night. She may have done with the infighting of werewolves, but they have not done with her; her former family call her back when they find themselves under threat from those they have excluded and dominated. Kelley Armstrong is very good on the sheer exhilaration of shape-changing, of running on four feet through forests, suburban greenery and urban back alleys; if there is a weakness here, it is that Elena’s relationship with the taciturn, untrustworthy Clay is sometimes a little too conventionally romantic–but the dark poetry of the best of the book overcomes this entirely.

I must admit if it hadn’t been for Kailana I would never have read Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten but some of her reviews of the Women of the Otherworld series were so enthusiastic, I simply had to try it. And to be honest “A werewolf thriller” sounded somewhat intriguing. I was not disappointed. Besides, my late grandmother being from Brittany, I grew up with werewolf tales and did belive them until my late teens. But this is not the reason why I liked it. I liked it because I could identify with the heroine. She is such a realistically drawn person. A strong woman who grew up in foster homes, looking for a family, a home, security but never seems to get it. The years alone have hardened her. But then she meets Clay. Beautiful, intelligent, mysterious Clay who offers her everything she never had. Who even goes to a lot of pain to offer her her first proper Christmas and who takes her to Stonehaven, the home of his family, Jeremy, Antony, Nick, Logan and the others. And then the unthinkable happens. He bites her. The only secret he has kept from her, that he is a werewolf, is a fatal one. Normally no one survives a werewolf bite. Only the strongest do. And there was never a female werewolf. Elena is the first.

At the beginning of the novel, Elena lives in Toronto with Philipp. She has left Stonehaven and the pack. She doesnt’ want to be an outsider of society, she wants to fit in, lead a normal live. One day however she gets a call from Jeremy, the Alpha male of the pack. Someone is threatening the pack, wants their territory and has started killing innocent people. She is reluctant to go back at first but finally gives in. Once she is there she realises how much she missed them. Especially Clay. The novel is action packed and fast paced. There is not only one other werewolf who wants to harm them, there are many. And they eventuallly start to kill the men from the pack. If they want to survive, they have to stick together and fight as one.

Elena fights alongside her men. As said before, she is a strong person. I would wish her as a role model for young women. Powerful and determined. What really surprised me is the writing. Did you ever want to know what it would feel like to be a werewolf? The writing is so detailed, and descriptive that you might very well have the feeling you know what it is like to smell with the nose of a wolf, to tread and run with the paws of a wolf, to hunt and to race through the forest at night. The character development of Elena is interesting too. At times I totally forgot I was reading Fantasy. The core theme is “being true to yourself” and that is certainly a theme anyone can relate to.

As you see, it is very entertaining. A werewolf thriller with a touching love story and a strong heroine. Bitten is the first in the series of Women of the Otherworld. I am not very keen on series but I might read the next one sooner or later.

Any series you like or would suggest?

Au cimetière du Trocadéro, un homme et une femme s’assoient sur un banc. Le vent souffle, elle n’arrive pas à allumer sa cigarette, ils entament la conversation. Elle s’appelle Christine, vit un peu hors du temps, entre un père obsédé par les mappemondes et un fiancé qui semble ne pas beaucoup compter. Lui, Daniel, parcourt le monde à la recherche d’objets anciens. Entre eux se noue une relation à part, clandestine, dans un Paris enneigé et brumeux. Du XVIe arrondissement à Casablanca, une galerie de portraits se dessine, mais une figure domine, entre ombre et lumière, celle, singulière et attachante, de Christine Stretter.

A man and a woman meet at the cemetery du Trocadéro in Paris. She tries to light a cigarette but the wind and the rain are too strong. They start to talk as if they had known each other forever. Christine lives outside of our daily world between a father obsessed with maps and a fiancé who is never there. Daniel is an antiquarian and travels the world. They will start to meet in hotels all over Paris and in the province.

Dancourt won the French prize for first novel and I am pretty sure he will be translated. This little book is far too wonderful and will be highly appreciated by people everywhere as it is also an homage to the city of Paris. Without knowing it ( I looked it up later) I knew that Dancourt is not a Parisian. Parisians do not render their city so lovingly. Only people from abroad and the homesick ones who live in other countries would describe it with such great detail.

Reading this filled me with a terrible longing. Missing a city is not much better than missing a person. On the other hand, the Paris of this book has an otherworldly quality and charm that the struggle of daily life, commuting etc. destroys sooner or later. This is the Paris we love to dream about, the town we would love to live in if we did not have to go to work every day.

Hôtel de Lausanne tells also a very lovely story in the typical French manner of not revealing too much. The people in this novel keep their mystery until the very end. We can only assume why they do this or that, it is never explained or analyzed.

Christine is engaged when she meets Daniel and even though their relationship is very profound and magical she still gets married to her fiancé as she always wanted to get married very young (she is only 21). The funny thing, even though this feels wrong on a logical level, it feels right emotionally. One has never the feeling of reading a book about an adulterous woman. And one never questions her choice. I never even wondered why she wasn’t getting married to Daniel if they were so close.

I liked this aura of mystery that encloses the people and the many descriptions of Paris, its little cafés and bars. Those typical little cafés no tourist would ever go to but where the people living close by, the so-called “habitués” will come every day, drink and eat and chat. Village-like coziness of big cities where you end up staying in your quartier unless you go to work. Christine and Daniel have their favourite places, where people know them and treat them like a couple and where they occasionally also meet someone who knew Christine’s mother. A haunting figure of whom we try to catch a glimpse as hard as Christine tries herself.

Hôtel de Lausanne is a very enchanting novel and I will certainly read more of Dancourt (his second novel Jardin d’hiver has just been published). As stated before I am pretty confident this will be translated. It simply has to.