The Book High

I've had this in my tbr list for a while, and just kept putting it off. I'm not sure what finally made me read it today, and I'm not sure I'm glad about it. The little explanation at the end where the author said she'd always wanted to write a story about two men chained up in a basement, falling in love with each other while one of them increasingly wants to eat the other's entrails kindof sums up the book. The story behind Mal and Zach each getting into the basement and even the development of the attachment between them is sketchy and unrealistic (yes, even for a werewolf story it's unrealistic).

I felt like I didn't get a solid understanding of why they kept making the decisions they did. They often spoke in half-sentences, not wanting to give their thoughts away to the other... but also keeping them from the reader. I did like the two mc's, hence the 2 stars. But I felt like I was given so little rationale for their actions and decisions that at the end I just found myself thinking "huh?" They escape somehow, after Zach waits around for Mal upstairs all night even though he could leave the virtual stranger who is now a wolf and could burst through the flimsy door at any moment and eat him. They sneak away from the house, hiding in bushes and abandoning a stolen car blocks away from Zach's house. Then they get to Zach's house and instead of either packing and continuing to sneak their way right out of town, or to grab some weapons and go back and get the big, bad wolves, they stop so Zach can introduce his new wolf boyfriend to his pet alley cat. And then it ends. Right there. No explanations, no reasoning why they had to sneak out, but are now content to just stay right at Zach's house where the wolves they were so afraid of just minutes before might appear at any moment. Just standing there petting the cat the author was proud enough of to mention in the silly post-confusing-novella blurb.

The premise is interesting enough that I could have liked this book, I think, if it were more fleshed-out and the characters better-developed. As it is, though, I can't give it more than the two stars and I can't say as I'd recommend it.