Rating: 3.5 stars
Synopsis: Countless teenage girls have been murdered...and Scarlett and Roise March know how they died; torn apart by werewolves. For Scarlett, the memories of a similar attack have left not just emotional scars but physical ones. The sisters fight side by side to save others from the same fate.
When the mysterious and brooding Silas arrives he inadvertantly causes a series of events that could endanger them all. As passion grows between Rosie and Silas, Scarlett uncovers some shocking secrets about Silas' family history that could tear the sisters apart - one way or the other...
Review: I really wanted to like this book. Really, really wanted to. The cover is gorgeous - on the image here the colours are matt but my copy is amazing and shiny and is completely gorgeous. I also love fairy tale retellings and after writing my own take on Little Red Riding Hood earlier this year, I really wanted to see how a 'professional' writer put their spin on the classic. And it was okay. Nothing amazing but okay.
The story is told in a dual POV from the two March sisters Scarlett and Rosie who dedicate their lives to hunting the Fenris (or wolves to you and me) to avenge their grandmother's murder seven years earlier. Both girls are quite strong characters but Scarlett definitely. As the oldest, Scarlett definitely carries around the whole I'm older and so you do as I say thing and Rosie just succumbs to it. During the murder of their grandmother, Scarlett saves her little sisters life and ends up losing an eye for her trouble and so Rosie feels insanely guilty and feels like she has to do whatever her sister says, which did get slightly irritating. Enter Silas, the family friend who moved away for a year and has just come back to town. He tries to get Rosie to live her life on her own terms and so she takes his advice and realises hey, this living my own life thing is actually great. The whole way through the book, all I kept thinking was, if Scarlett loves her sister so much, surely she'd understand if she wanted a small break from hunting? Apparently not. Normally, headstrong and dominating female protagonists work really well in fiction. They're able to make the hard decisions that move the plot forward but there is a fine line between being strong and being overbearingly strong which, for me, is what Scarlett is and it's a little annoying because she's always in everyone's face and making decisions for them.
On the other end of the scale is Rosie, who is desperately trying to prove to her sister that she can hunt alone and is as strong as she is but Scarlett is wary of letting her go. Out of the two sisters, I think I preferred Rosie more - she seemed more human as a character. Scarlett is completely fixated on the hunt which meant that, as a reader, I couldn't really connect with her as a character. Rosie on the other hand, can be a little overly sweet sometimes, but, on the whole, I was a lot more interested in her characters than Scarlett's. I feel like there's more of a character development throughout the book in terms of Rosie's character - she does become strong and capable and proves this to herself and Scarlett. I didn't feel Scarlett grew much as a character. This maybe came from the fact that the main plot point focuses around Rosie and Silas more than Scarlett but on the whole I don't think she changed too much. By the end of the book I was rooting for Rosie and was really pleased with how she managed to get herself out of a sticky situation alone and, clueless as to why she ended up in said situation.
The romance aspect of it was again, okay. Silas turns up and Rosie realises he's quite hot and Silas realises that she's quite hot and then it takes 200 pages of them holding themselves back from touching each other and speaking to each other just in case they make a fool out of themselves. Yet it's so obvious that they both like each other. One they are together it's a really sweet relationship. I love a sweet relationship I just hated the build up and the whole insta-connection that seems to appear in so many novels at the moment. Does anyone look at someone and realise they're completely head over heels for them? Maybe in Disney (which is fine because it's Disney and Disney can do no wrong) but in actual real life? It doesn't happen as far as I can tell. So when it happens in a book I'm instantly sceptical.
What really lowered the rating for me though was that the plot was predictable. I'm the easiest person to fool I swear - when everyone else is saying that they knew who committed the murder, it comes as a complete surprise for me, but 50 pages in and I already guessed what was going to happen. Especially since it's pretty much laid out for you in the synopsis. I thought that maybe, since it was laid out in the synopsis, something would happen to change it up and throw you completely but it didn't. Everything that I expected to happen, happened and it really let me down.
Overall, it's not a completely awful book but I had really high expectations going into reading it and it did leave me disappointed at the end of it. If you want a quick read, you can probably get through this in a couple of days if you're a fast reader but it doesn't really leave you wanting a sequel or wanting to spend more time with the characters.
Image from http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6357708-sisters-red - no Copyright intended
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