Curse of the Wolf Girl Book

I shouldn't have bothered. Why do I read this crap?

I moderately enjoyed the first novel in this series but with so many great books to read, why do I settle for moderation? I suppose the cover art hooked me. It is quite seductive. I suppose I had hopes the writing would improve from Book 1 to Book 2. Unfortunately, it got worse. I suppose I thought the characters might have a little more depth in Book 2. They were even more shallow. I suppose I thought it would be "fun" because the first was somewhat fun. Sadly, Book 2 was rather painful. But when you come down to it, what sucked me into this is our human addiction to story. Or as might be commonly called "plot." What Joseph Campbell would call "myth." Shallow characters (as in, written without depth as opposed to written as shallow people) are not, apparently, a detriment to the popularity of significant swathes of mainstream literature nor postmodern fiction for that matter, which often eschews conventions of character development. If events occur that build toward a climax then there is a natural tendency for us to want to know "what happens next." Hollywood knows this well. Keep the plot moving. Even with bad actors, all you need is special affects and forward momentum to keep an audience riveted.

So I was seduced by plot. Wondering what would happen to these cardboard characters. With this postmodern twist: the experience was closer to wondering what the author would do with the characters than what would happen to the characters. The characters in Curse of the Werewolf Girl were puppets with a checklist of personality attributes. I should say a shortlist of attributes. Nothing complex here, just a couple characteristics and that'll do, pig, that'll do.*

Just as in the first novel in the series, several female leads are utterly obsessed with fashion. And beyond that, their interest only extends to romance and social standing. The main character, Kalix, is a 17 year-old werewolf laudanum addict and former runaway rooming with a couple college kids whose elaborate personalities consist of the responsible "Mom" and the sad sack goth. Kalix is just plain goddamn annoying. An utterly whiny bitch. She is written as a rather empty-headed angry mopey violent teen (with a rough childhood). She perpetuates stupid angry banter with boys and her friends. I wonder if her being a werewolf is supposed to make up for her lack of depth? It's a rather inappropriate contradiction in the genre of the book that it features a drug addicted "hero," much ripping of bodies, and yet Kalix is written with the attitude of the most juvenile YA novel. As if every teen were nothing more sophisticated than an angry stupid mopey ball of hormones. As if a teen worth writing about is one who is nothing more than an angry stupid mopey ball of hormones. She was supremely irritating and by the end I wanted her to get killed. Too bad she's the main character.

Of all the weak elements of this book, the one that bothered me the most was Millar's scenic level descriptions. They were so frequently awkward that it felt as though Millar had outlined what he wanted to happen in each scene...and then couldn't be bother to flesh them out. Character A strikes Character B who drops into the top right pocket so that Character C could get angry at Character A, blah-blah-blah. Several scenes that brought together large number of characters for comedic or dramatic purposes seemed to have been developed via Venn Diagrams. Hmmhh, what justification could I come up with to move this character to this location and this character here and this character here to make a larger circle of characters that I can throw darts at.

Dialogue was...for the most part acceptable.

Further paper cuts:
• Overly frequent descriptions of characters' appearances. How many times do we need to read about the long flowing hair of the various female werewolves?
• The text was crammed into 360 pages with small margins, small text and tight kerning where spaces often dropped out between sentences. I can only imagine this was done to save on costs in order to drop the page count down below a certain number.
• Although it was supposed to be hilarious, I managed only two smiles out of the whole book. A violent Douglas Adams he ain't.

In summation: No good. Don't bother. Why did I?

*See Babe: The Gallant Pig. Do see it.