#ReadingLife: Released

Indie Author Alert: my latest read was Released by Julie Embleton, and it's book two in her Turning Moon series. It's a fated mates wolf shifter romance, between Michael, a wolf who fled his pack because of the crushing guilt he carries thanks to what happened in book one, Bound, and Genna, a human living with guilt of her own. Two burdened souls destined for one another, faced with a villain who is truly evil, and a twist at the end that I didn't see coming. You will need to read book one first, and last I checked, it's free to download for Kindle! 

This book left me ruminating on something. Obviously, fiction is fiction, and we read it with the understanding that unlikely and fantastic things will unfold between the pages. But even with the wildest and most imaginative stories, readers still demand a certain level of realism: they want characters to feel like authentic humans with authentic reactions to all big reveals and plot twists. 

But...do they? Do they really? Because how adaptable is the average person? How trusting of strangers? How accepting of the shocking and the unexplained? 

In Released, when Genna learns that Michael is a werewolf, and witnesses him shift from wolf to human, she freaks out. Rightfully so. Her doubt and panic over realizing the supernatural forces of storybooks are real and now a part of her life sends her into more than one tailspin, and I appreciated the reality of that. Because I believe that, though we all love a vampire, or a werewolf, or even a human killer/criminal, like an outlaw biker or a mafia don, in fiction, if we met or fell in love with one in real life, we would freak out, too. In fiction, that process often gets expedited or glossed over; the heroine adapts quickly and sometimes even effortlessly, and while readers might like that, might enjoy that head-first fall into the unknown, it isn't realism. 

Something I've noticed in the response to my own work: characters who begin on the outside of a closed system - be it club or supernatural pack - are the ones least liked by readers. If a woman takes a beat or two to come to terms with her new normal, she gets picked apart. Characters like Ava, in Dartmoor, don't ever have those attacks of conscience with regard to the club's illegal or even murderous activity because she was born into the club, and it's the only normal she's ever known. This streamlines that drama in a pleasing way: we dive, instead, straight into the drama of her romance, her struggles with the bad guys, etc. But characters like Emmie, like Sam, like Whitney have to work through that "holy crap, these guys are scary!" stage, and it pushes the character, and the audience, further outside the inner workings of the club by necessity. 

It comes back to - as ever - perspective. Characters inside the system will view it differently and react to it differently than those outside of it. Props to Julie for giving Genna that realistic struggle.