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Warclaw by Samantha McGivern
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



This may be the worst book ever to be published. "Published." Self-published.

Through the first couple pages, it started with just bad writing.

The birds tweeted in the trees.

Dear authors: Nowadays 'tweeted' is a bad word to use when referring to bird noises, as Twitter has pretty much coopted the word. I was picturing birds sitting in trees, smartphones in wing, typing away.

The story was about a lone wolf. A real, supposedly normal wolf. Another wolf showed up on the beach he was living on, and she was scared of him. (For some reason, she was occasionally referred to as 'it' by the author.)

It gulped down a ball of saliva.

A ball of saliva? First off, eww. Second, WTF?

The normal, regular, supposedly realistic lone wolf looked into the female wolf's eyes and described them as:

Her eyes were like a titanium safe with a DNA lock and a matching password.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over.

Barely into the first chapter, and the story took a sharp turn. Apparently this female wolf betrayed the lone wolf somehow and got him kicked out of the pack. (Again, these were supposedly just normal wolves...)

Warclaw growled loudly at her, so loud it was possible to hear him from the other side of the forest.

Wolves: Now with built-in megaphones.

Chapter two, and things take another sharp turn. These supposedly normal wolves get human-level plotting and grudges. Warclaw, the lone wolf, apparently has some treasure he keeps in the lighthouse he sleeps in, and suddenly knows the female wolf (Willow) from chapter one is there to steal it for her alpha so she can get in good with the alpha again... Warclaw has ZERO way of knowing this, the knowledge just appears in the story from nowhere. So Warclaw decides to kill her. Dawn breaks, and he attacks her. Next paragraph and it's midday, he's still fighting her. The author repeatedly says the whole battle is Warclaw biting her neck, she lands no return bites on him other than one small one.

By late evening the battle had finally come to an end. A whole day wasted by fighting. The once clean floor was now covered in dark red blood.

So, to be clear, Warclaw spend about 12 hours doing nothing but biting this female wolf's throat trying to kill her...

Willow never stood a wolves chance against him!

Yeah, except for the 12 hours it took him to bite through her throat..?

The book was full of surprises, sometimes multiple surprises in single sentences:

Warclaw had fought many wars over the past few centuries,...

BUH? Wait, wait. This normal wolf... wars... centuries?

...so he knew where to kill quickly and do the most damage.

Twelve. Hours. To. Bite. Through. Her. Throat.

I got three chapters into the book before hitting the end of my time to read for the night. It's really, really, really bad, but one of those rare books that it's so bad it becomes amusing. I moved on to a new book this morning, but I think I won't delete this one and might return to it. Multiple times I laughed out loud at how bad it was, and I'm actually interested to see what other insane things the author comes up with.

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