Nightshade review

Nightshade by Andrea Cremer.


What's it about?
She can control her pack, but not her heart ...'I wanted him to kiss me?wished he could smell the desire that I knew was pouring off me. You can't, Calla. This boy isn't the one for you.' Calla Tor has always known her destiny: graduation, marriage and then a life leading her pack. But when she defies her masters' laws to save a human boy, she must choose. Is one boy worth losing everything?


My review:
4/5
I have to say for the first 100 pages I was pretty frustrated with this book because that's how long it took until things started to get explained, whilst I could see the reason for why the author waited this long it made the start of the book somewhat confusing. After this, however, I found it difficult to put down and even stayed up late to finish.
The story is a great one and not one I felt like I'd 'read before', and it's beautifully written, with a few funny one liners that had me giggling.
As for the characters, there wasn't one I disliked reading, even the bad guys. Calla, our leading lady, is fierce and strong, if a little naive, it isn't until charming and funny Shay comes along and pushes her does she start question her world and taking risks to find answers.
I found it harder to get a grip on Ren, Callas other male suitor, when he's first introduced it's as quite a womaniser, so when five minutes later he's promising monogamy, well, it's hard to believe, there was a lot of points that he was very pushy and dominant and others when he was the opposite which made it hard to figure him out.
Though I enjoyed the book a lot, I do have very minor complaints, such as the two packs coming together and going from rivals to friends seemingly overnight without any kind of transitional period and there were some points where I had to kind of guess at what was happening because it wasn't actually said, but I can't really give examples without spoilers.
There were also a couple of scenes that felt 'choppy' because there were so many characters in them all with short bursts of dialogue and direction.
But like I said, minor complaints - overall I really enjoyed the book and immediately preordered Wolfsbane, book 2, which is out in July.