Book Review – Stray

Author: Rachel Vincent
Publisher: MIRA Books
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 2007

Stray is the story of a Faythe, a werecat, one of the few remaining reproductive females, who is targeted for kidnapping. This book is a mixture of family politics, romance and fantasy adventure. While this book has many parts that I should have enjoyed when combined, I couldn’t truly love it. I felt that there was a good story going on but that the author obscured it with overly dramatic characters, character inconsistencies, some small plot holes and a too convenient plot device.

Faythe, the teenaged protagonist is ordered home from college by her Alpha who is her father. While at home she does everything within her power to get her way and annoy everyone else. Then, while indulging her own self pity, she makes a mistake in judgment that is nearly fatal. Luckily for her this mistake leads to the eventual capture of the murderer/kidnapper and the location and release of another kidnapping victim from her pride. Her escape is engineered with the aid of the ‘convenient plot device’ I mentioned earlier. She discovers that she can cause portions of her body to make the ‘change’ from human to cat without completing the whole change. This partial change, which has never been heard of before, allows her to assume several of the best offensive and defensive traits of the cat without giving up the flexibility and intellect of her human self. Though no one in her pride has ever heard of this being able to occur, she is able to do it for the second time under the pressure of being a kidnapping victim.

This plot device and some inconsistencies within her characters tend to make this book both less than it should be in the story sense and more than it should be in length. The only other issue I had was the ‘werecat’ angle. They changed into common tabbies, though larger. Sure, it is different from many of the other were-animal stories that are so prevalent at the moment, but it seemed too dull and tame. When those tabbies are shown to be able to affect brutal and graphic human damage, it seemed out of place. I felt that this could have been a really good story that captivated my imagination from beginning to end. Unfortunately those little things that could have been alleviated by a really good editing and rewrite, kept me from truly enjoying the story. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t forcing myself to finish this one like I’ve done for many others recently but it could have been so much more enjoyable.

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About amberdrake

I'm a 40 year old desk jockey who amuses herself with lots and lots of reading. My favorite things in books are dragons, steampunk, wizards, comedy, and lots of action!