Book Jacket:
Mackenzie and Amy were best friends. Until Amy was brutally murdered.
Since then, Mac’s life has been turned upside down. She is being haunted by Amy in her dreams, and an extremist group called the Trackers has come to Mac’s hometown of Hemlock to hunt down Amy’s killer: A white werewolf.
Lupine syndrome—also known as the werewolf virus—is on the rise across the country. Many of the infected try to hide their symptoms, but bloodlust is not easy to control.
Wanting desperately to put an end to her nightmares, Mac decides to investigate Amy’s murder herself. She discovers secrets lurking in the shadows of Hemlock, secrets about Amy’s boyfriend, Jason, her good pal Kyle, and especially her late best friend. Mac is thrown into a maelstrom of violence and betrayal that puts her life at risk.
Kathleen Peacock’s thrilling novel is the first in the Hemlock trilogy, a spellbinding urban fantasy series filled with provocative questions about prejudice, trust, lies, and love.
You can read an excerpt here.
Review:
On the one hand, yes, this book is exactly what you’d expect – plucky, gorgeous heroine caught between brooding, bad boy hottie and good guy bestie in a love triangle that threatens to tear them apart, yada yada yada. If you, like me, take one look at that sea of angst and want to drown yourself in it, I can offer you this one hopeful buoy – Peacock does actually bring something interesting to the table in terms of her world building.
I grant you it’s not terribly unusual for an author to use the paranormal as a way to explore our prejudices, but Peacock touches on some interesting issues – ideas of safety versus security, the dehumanizing nature of prejudice, and how hate and politics collide – which are all very relevant in our post 9/11 world. All in all it was more than enough to resuscitate my interest every time it flagged in the face of yet another slog through the angst mire, and while yes, it may not all have added up to anything terribly deep or revelatory, I still really, really liked it. I very much enjoyed how Peacock explored the forces of hate and fear, and forced her characters to take sides – I just wish that story could have taken center stage, instead of the overwrought love triangle.
As for the murder mystery, it was solidly interesting. I did get miles ahead of it – as I suspect everyone will, because honestly there’s no real doubt about who the bad guy is – but I still enjoyed Mac’s sleuthing and how it made her question the people she trusted. Mac pokes in dark corners and falls into peril with enough regularity to keep things moving along nicely, and it all comes together at the end in a satisfying way – I just wish there had been more to the puzzle, and less angst mucking up the works.
And now we’ve come to the heart of the matter – the love triangle quagmire. Now don’t get me wrong, our three Love Interests are all perfectly likable: Mac is tough and sarcastic in a pleasant, if not terribly surprising, way, and Kyle and Jason are at least easy to tell apart, with Jason being the jerk Mac just keeps on forgiving, and Kyle the sweetie she starts to feel more for – but I will give Peacock this; she does give us believable reasons for Jason’s behavior, and by doing so keeps alive a thread of sympathy for a character who otherwise could easily have become just one more jerk who treats his girl like crap (and yet somehow the girl falls for him anyway…) Oh for the love of all that’s holy, enough with the Love Triangles already! Hemlock was a story that had so much going for it, yet the best parts kept getting ignored or trampled in favor of the painfully familiar Love Triangle. Honestly towards the end of this story the angsting became so over-indulgent and overwrought that it actively started to sour my feelings towards the book as a whole. True, it never quite overpowered my desire to finish the story, but it did at times make me want to throw the book against a wall – or at the very least yell at all the characters to shut up and get back to solving the murder. But if you’re a fan of brooding and sighing, there’s certainly plenty of it to be found here.
In the end, Hemlock did keep my interest, which actually says a fair bit given my general desire to drop-kick all paranormal YA love triangles. There’s enough here, in terms of social tensions, opposing forces, and a climate of fear, to make this book worth reading, even for the angst-fatigued such as myself – and the fact that Peacock managed to land squarely on some of my greatest pet peeves and yet still kept me reading is actually kind of impressive. So yes, as far as paranormal YA goes, you could do a whole lot worse than to read this one.
Byrt Grade: B+
As Levar Burton used to say – you don’t have to take my word for it…
Jacob fans rejoice: Peacock’s debut is loaded with werewolves both creepy and hot.
This book inches toward the stereotypical normal-girl-pursued-by-two-(possibly nonhuman)-guys syndrome, but Mackenzie is a delightful and satirical enough narrator to compensate for the overt teen drama, and the thriller plot is both intense and intricate enough to provide a good read.
…because this is a teen paranormal romance, the dominant plot is, surprise, a love triangle…As Mackenzie says to herself, “It was official: my life belonged on the CW.” It’s this ironic self-awareness that keeps the book at all palatable.
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