Second Nature by Jae

Title: Second Nature
Author: Jae
Publisher: L-Book ePublisher
Buy the Book: Publisher

Blurb:

Novelist Jorie Price doesn’t believe in the existence of shape-shifting creatures or true love. She leads a solitary life, and the paranormal romances she writes are pure fiction for her.

Griffin Westmore knows better — at least about one of these two things. She doesn’t believe in love either, but she’s one of the not-so-fictional shape-shifters. She’s also a Saru — an elite soldier, investigator, and if need be an assassin with the mission to protect the shape-shifters’ secret existence at any cost.

When Jorie gets too close to the truth in her latest shape-shifter romance, Griffin is sent to investigate — and if necessary to destroy the manuscript before it’s published and to kill the writer.

Review:

Sometimes you’re paranoid, and sometimes it turns out that everyone around you really is a lesbian shapeshifter. You just never know ’til you piss them off.

Author Jorie Price is striking out in a bold new direction with her writing: a novel about lesbian shapeshifters. She’s pretty sold on the idea but can’t figure out why everyone around her is starting to act a little strange. Given that Jorie’s a bit paranoid, she starts to wonder whether even her beta reader’s continued messages encouraging her in other directions are just a blowoff or something more sinister.

Oh come on. You know where this is going: it’s totally something more sinister.

Jorie’s beta reader has noticed that the new novel is eerily similar to the way shapeshifting actually works, and, being a shapeshifter herself, she sounds the shapeshifting alarm and alerts the shapeshifter’s governing council. To say they’re displeased is putting it mildly. When you’re simply displeased, you frown, maybe you stomp your foot. No, the council is ticked and they immediately dispatch a flotilla of assassins to Jorie’s location.

One of those assassins, Griffin, is a six-foot-two lesbian cat-shifter cum park ranger who takes one look at Miss Price and falls for her, hard.

Three guesses as to how the council feels about that sort of thing?

Uh huh.

This book is a romp. It’s 600 pages of lesbian shapeshifting cozy action, complete with family tension (both of the cat and human variety), mild-mannered protagonists and a scenery-chewing villain with Issues (although I suspect he and Ted would hit it off like a house on fire. He would dom the tar out of that boy and they’d set up a household. Everybody wins.)

I could definitely have seen the shapeshifting and the cozy being separated out into two separate books, but the decision to blend them actually works really well. The risk pays off, and the author’s ability to control and weave the two storylines into a coherent whole is frankly impressive.

My quibbles with the book were sort of minor: there were a few times that Griffin came off as a dude with breasts, there were way too many fanfiction “in-jokes” and back-pats and I think my biggest quibble was that the top-secret goings-on of the Council What Shapeshifts got a little much at times, with all of them sort of willfully being confused and a bit dim as to the villain’s nefarious intentions all at once.

I mean, come on. If they’ve been able to keep the existence of shapeshifters a secret all this time, surely one of them is smart enough to smell what the roc is cooking.

Also, despite my frankly *awesome* bird joke up there, the villain points out early on that there are no shapeshifting birds, which I got completely distracted by for about fifty pages. The whole shapeshifting rules and mythology is given a pretty thorough going over, in the book, and yet no birds! But they would be so useful! So evolutionarily advanced! Gentle Readers, I was puzzled.

Anyway.

It’s a fun book. There are fun supporting characters and big lesbian drama (which is one of my ticklespots–hold me) and shapeshifting which, for one of the few times in recorded history, worked for me. So that should tell you quite a bit about the quality of the writing. There were a couple of authorial bobbles (as detailed above) and no passage really stood out to me as beautifully quotable, but it’s a solid little read.

I’m a little worried that L-Book’s pricing will put off potential readers, because I can’t say I would have spent as much as they’re asking for an e-book. But that’s not really my field. Mine’s having found a book that deals with shapeshifters in a way I finally like.

If there’d been more small-town Michigan details, I would have bumped it up to four stars. On the other hand, if this author ever decides to write a lesbian cozy mystery, I will beat all the other Three Dollar Bill reviewers to the feeding trough to snatch it up and clutch it to my drama-loving breast, cost be darned.