Review: Revelry, Peta Crake

Revelry by Peta Crake
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up when it was available as a Read It Now from Netgalley. Sounded intriguing, and I do love shapeshifter paranormal romance, especially with a small town setting.

However, I didn't particularly like this book. It started off quite promising, a young woman on the run from a mysterious past, trying to hide and work her way from place to place, and a hot guy with some mystery of his own. Right off, I found it very repetitive, constantly telling me Revelry, the female lead, was on the run, she was hiding, she couldn't trust anyone, especially men. She could never show people her arms due to scarring inflicted on her by her tragic past. Similar thing with Connor, the male. His past and issues told over and over. Missing sister, and other stuff.

Also, unless it was the editing or formatting in the version I read, view points changed suddenly without a paragraph break or warning. One minute there'd be a paragraph from Revelry's view point, and next think you knew, you would be seeing thing from Conner's view point. While it wasn't exactly difficult to work out who was speaking, being written in third person, it was still...jarring. Personally I like shifting view points to look at the story from other characters' eyes, however, I do like some sort of a break in between, rather than just shifting without warning.

I felt absolutely no chemistry between Conner and Revelry, they spent a huge part of the novel not trusting each other, even though he seemed to be falling for her in spite of everything. Didn't work for me. The introduction of the murder and stalker mystery was what kept me going but by about half way through the answer was revealed and it was like, oh, that's who it is? Then Revelry's past catches up and things go even more haywire.

And by then I was skipping really just to see how it ended. And even then it was a bit blah. While it was an interesting idea, the story just didn't work for me.