Emma (howlsmovinglibrary)'s Reviews > Bitten

I couldn't finish this not because the writing was bad, or even because the plot was boring (I really couldn't judge, I never got that far into it, but it was going ok). I just really hate the characters. Clayton is probably the most unattractive and disgusting love interest I have read in a book thus far. Am I the only one who finds their first sex scene discomfortingly rapey? I know that they're relationship is 'complex' but I just couldn't stand him. I always stop after that scene, disgusted with how it is played. As in 50 Shades, a woman's attraction/physical reaction to the man forcing her seems to make everything okay, when it REALLY isn't. Knowing from friends that the book was going to focus on their dynamic, I just couldn't continue, as it's everything I hate in a romance - a first love who ruins the female character's life through some horrible life shattering decision that she's unable to go back from, and yet she still ends up with him. How is that okay? It's just means she's trapped, unable to progress, or shake the influence of the man who in many ways devastated all her hopes and dreams.

Elena starts off ok, and I truly do understand the conflict within her due to the tumultuous past (maybe just a bit too tumultuous, as it fits with a lot of tropes that have - perhaps after Armstrong used them - become cliches), but I didn't sympathise enough with her to continue the story. My vague like of her was not enough to combat my hate of Clay and my dislike of her when she's around Clay. She's a 'strong' character, but not strong enough to get rid of the influence of both the pack and her former lover. As the pack is also all male, I found that moral a bit discomforting. Jeremy treats Elena's attempt to break from the Pack and the life she's been forced into with indulgence, as if it's a childhood tantrum, and, ultimately, he is proven correct, which is something I really wouldn't have been able to stomach. So I just put it down and moved on.