Shift (Shifters #5) by Rachel Vincent

Faythe’s pack is preparing werecats of North America are poised on the edge of the civil war…

Until a new threat appears – Thunderbirds. None of them are used to fighting the birds and they scrabble desperately to find some way to stop the assault

As ever, Faythe and her fellow tabbies are prime targets.

This book has opened the world building of the series a lot more to include another of the shapeshifter creatures that occupy this world. The Thunderbirds

It would have been really nice if “Thunderbirds” actually involved even a shred of Native American mythology beyond just the word. Instead it just means “werebird”. Actually, given the “spicy latinos” of the first book, I think I’m leery of wishing this book includes more than its two token latino characters.

The werebirds themselves are relatively interesting – especially since they seem to show a very different culture which should, really, be a wonderful challenge to all that is wrong with werecat culture. It’s not patriarchal and it’s completely non-hierarchical. I also like how they’ve adopted a level of avian nature into the shapeshifters with things like carrion eating. One of the many complaints I’ve had of the werecat world building is how it has failed to really establish them as cats (like they keep going for “runs”. Cats play in many ways, but they’re not wolves, they’re not endurance runners)

While the world building of the Thunderbirds is interesting and I’d actually like to see more of this new society, the plot is just a bit meh

The Thunderbirds are attacking… but the sheer inability of them to actually sensibly change their decisions is… dubious

Similarly the werecats inability to come up with any strategy to fight back seems equally dubious. All they did was cower inside, completely unable to fight back against a Thunderbird strategy that seemed limited to picking them up (sometimes needing 2 birds) and the dropping them. On top of that we had an equally dubious decision for Faythe and Kaci to go running off virtually unguarded for their own safety

Prey (Shifters #4) by Rachel Vincent

Faythe’s pride is being embroiled more and more into vicious werecat politics as her father’s rival will resort to any means to try and take control of the council. Up to and including dragging them into a war.

There’s something else going on with the Strays as well, not part of any Pride, they’re often ignored. But when Marc, Faythe’s love interest, goes missing she is torn between staying with the Pride and looking for Marc

The plot of this book slightly frustrates me. There are two interesting plot lines I’d really like to focus on – the political shenanigans of the werecat council as an alpha does his very best to overrule Greg and replace him as head of the council by any means necessary. The second is the plot line of Pride cats apparently doing odd things to Stray cats and tracking them. I have no idea why, given that any Stray can pretty much be murdered and no-one actually cares. Those are interesting plot lines

Instead we focus far more on Faythe trying to find Marc who has gone missing. I don’t care. I don’t like Marc. I’ve never liked Marc. I think Marc’s relationship with Faythe has just been so very terrible for so very long. If he dropped out of the series entirely I’d be much much happier. So a storyline all about finding him? Not really something I’m going to focus on.

I’m going to have to repeat a lot of what I said in the last book in this series. It’s not exactly bad or even problematic – if we ignore everything that has come before it.

I can almost feel the author desperately trying to rewrite those previous books. I’m almost certain that if there was a way to go back in time and change them the author would. We can see the narrative they want to tell:

Faythe lives in a misogynist society but is lucky to be born in the very progressive Pride who is trying to walk back a lot of the worst abuses of their society – both against women and against Strays. Greg, her father, understands the science and realities and has every faith in his daughter being a capable ruler and taking over after him. Faythe was very young in the first book, naïve, unaware of how good she had it and full of childish rebellion. But she learned from her mistakes and is continuing to grow and learn and mature (even if, even in the last book, Faythe proved herself to be completely incapable of controlling her tongue for five damn seconds). And now she has grown and is still frustrated but she and her dad are fighting the good fight. Not only are they fighting the good fight, but Faythe has learned and grown and is even a moderating influence on her father when he starts to make rash and emotional decisions

Pride (Shifters #3) by Rachel Vincent

Faythe is on trial for infecting and killing her human boyfriend – trying to convince a council of Alphas that something happened when they don’t only not believe her - but don’t even believe that what she claims is even possible

But the trial cannot happen in solitude – a whole army of strays have moved into the area and have to be dealt with

I expected this book to be a lot worse than it was. Admittedly after the last two books, the book could literally be possessed by a serial killing ghost that tried to attack me with a claw hammer and it would still be a better book than I expected. Still, my low expectations meant I was definitely pleasantly surprised.

In this book, the misogynist Alphas questioned Faythe on whether or not she intended to marry and how many kids she’d have – and if she didn’t have any immediate plans she was simply useless to werecat society: because what’s the point of a werecat female who isn’t pushing out the young ‘uns? Honestly, I expected Faythe to grab Marc’s engagement ring, suddenly become pregnant and problem solved! So, kudos, Pride for not doing this

In fact, in general Pride wasn’t nearly as offensively awful as the previous books, not even close. Partly this is due to the complete lack of spicy South American werecats (and general POC. You wouldn’t even know Marc was Latino if you didn’t know from previous books). Normally I would complain about lack of POC, but like the lack of LGBTQ characters I find myself slightly grateful simply because it means we won’t have to endure he representation (though we do have a ridiculous moment where 3 people share a single bed and leave another empty because a) the 2 men won’t let the other share a bed with Faythe and b) two men sharing a bed is terribad icky.)

The main issues I have with this book is that it completely ignores the context of the books that have come before. Like we have Greg, Faythe’s father who is pretty much cast as the Good One in this book. He is the reasonable Alpha. He is the nice Alpha. And he’s just being terribly trapped by the Alpha council who is totally awful and old fashioned and misogynist.

Rogue (Shifters #2) by Rachel Vincent

There’s another serial killer targeting women. And this one isn’t focused on tabbies – but is completely focused on Faythe. She is paying a hard price for her limited freedom.

This book is pretty bad – but what makes it far worse is the epic awful misogyny of the first book that is carried on, brushed over and justified. It’s that last part which especially annoys me.

They constantly downplay how Faythe is treated (also can I say now that every time I have to type the abysmally spelled name “Fayth” I lose some more brain cells. This keeps up and I might even enjoy the last book. If that happens dear readers, please hunt me down and kill me for my own good). There’s no acknowledgement that the whole reason Faythe is there is because her father is blackmailing and threatening her. There is no acknowledgement that Marc once nearly beat a fellow werecat and friend to death because he presumed to be interested in Faythe. Not even by the werecat he nearly murdered (but what nods there are to it seem to blame Faythe for not being obedient property) There’s no acknowledgement of the fact that Faythe’s renewed relationship with Marc is down to him finding her when she was drunk and vulnerable. There’s no acknowledgement that her love interest There’s no acknowledgement that the whole foundation of this relationship is because Faythe’s parents have basically groomed her into this since she was a small child. They make little jokey side references to the weeks when her father literally locked her in a cage, forcing her to use a coffee can as a toilet because she dared to try and live her own life.

All of this is lightly, even jokingly referenced. The sheer horrendous abuse her family is inflicting on her is never ever acknowledged by anyone. Not even Faythe.

But worse is, as I said, the justification. There’s no women on the leadership council because they totally don’t want to be part of the leadership. Woman don’t want power all women, every last one of them, want to stay home and be full time mothers and wives. And yes, some women do want that – some men want that – but this is used to excuse a complete lack of female leadership. This book tries to make lots of little references to how secretly awesome Faythe’s mother is – but none of that is ever shown, it’s clear she’s turned her back on all of that and her motherhood has actually damaged the pride. Even the moment where she steps up and is presented as awesome feels very lacking. She turns into a cat to take down someone who is still in human form… and fails. If Faythe hadn’t stepped in she’d be dead: in previous books we’ve pretty much seen a werecat in cat form easily taking down one in human form. Her moment of awesome is played up as awesome – but when looked at without the spin we see a really low expectation for her capabilities. We’re even told that she hardly ever shapeshifts – everything about her being a werecat is downplayed

This is just a prelude to the worst – the antagonist in this book is directly caused by Faythe daring to have sex with a guy other than the man her parents have chosen and deemed appropriate. Even while she outright tries to call her brothers out on how they sleep with a gazillion human women each but they all judge her – but her sex life is the one that has literal serial killer consequences. She is the one who is presented as WRONG for having sex.

This is what is the utter worst about this book – both of these books – and the treatment of misogyny. We’re presented with a deeply, disgustingly and inexcusably misogynist society. Faythe speaks out against it. AND THEN SHE IS PROVEN WRONG. This isn’t just the depiction of a misogynist society that is then challenged. It is a depiction of a misogynist society that is challenged and then the challenger is put in her place and the OBJECTIVE REALITY of that world backs up that society and puts Faythe back in her place.

Stray (Shifters #1) by Rachel Vincent

Faythe wants freedom from her repressive werecat family. As one of the very few female werecats, her father and brothers want her firmly repressed, kept at home and quickly married off to a man of their choosing. Faythe wants to go to college and lead her own life as an actual person…

But when other female werecats are targeted by an outside force, Faythe finds herself dragged home

So, Cyna brought this book to my attention with her review. Therefore my suffering through this is all her fault and I will never ever ever let her forget this.

There’s so much wrong with this book that I’m going to have to take it in little bites just to get through it all. Let’s start at the simplest: the protagonist is called “Faythe”.

Faythe? What kind of Originalnamee misspelling is this? Is there a reason why she couldn’t have been called Faith?

Next, let’s take the super shallow world building. We have werecats – yay, original, something different from werewolves. Except not. Everything about the way these werecats are portrayed is pretty much identical to all of the endless troped portrayals of werewolves we’ve seen. The alpha. The Pack (or pride) is the same all-controlling violent unit we’ve seen a hundred times before. It’s a shame- this could have been the opportunity to tell a story about wereanimals that doesn’t revolve around the typical not-even-accurate-for-wolves violent pack model. But this series doesn’t even claim a particular species of cat – they’re just generic big cats. It feels… lazy

And the word for a female cat isn’t a “tabby” it’s a “queen” – or does that imply too much power for these women?

Which is another awful problem with the world building. We have yet another shapeshifter story where for REASONS women are super rare. We’ve seen this so many times – for some reason there is a desperate urge to make women rare in these stories, to have women surrounded by men and, ultimately, it is used as yet another reason to make women vulnerable and powerless.

In an odd “twist” I guess, women inherit the pride alpha status. A pride that doesn’t have a female heir will collapse. But the power over the pride doesn’t go to the daughter – it goes to the man she marries.  Why not just have the alpha status transfer to the oldest son and be done with it? There’s nothing empowered about making women “powerful” solely for their relationships, being love interests, being mothers. They’re not powerful, they’re objects defined entirely by the men in their lives, to be used and controlled

This could have been interesting if we’d had Faythe facing down this misogyny, challenging it and working to change it – but the whole point of the book seems to be about telling Faythe how wrong she is and making her get into line.