Review: Maria Vale's FOREVER WOLF.

I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley but all opinions provided are my own.

I’ve got that anxious, excited feeling I used to get in English class because I was bursting with stuff to say, and it’s about Maria Vale’s Forever Wolf. This isn't the first time I've thought this about one of her books: I’ve never read a romance novel like this before.
 
Forever Wolf is the third in Vale’s The Legend of All Wolves series, and it’s beautiful. It’s also the darkest book in a romance series that doesn’t shy away from the dark.
 
The first thing to say about the plot is that this is a shifter romance, about wolves.
 
Our heroine Varya is a shielder—a position of esteem—in the Great North pack. She journeyed to the pack alone after all the wolves in her former pack died, and to her, the pack is everything. She’s known for upholding order, even when that devotion doesn’t exactly win her any friends.
 
But then she runs across an injured wolf, Eyulf, and on him she smells her old home. She has a connection with him, even as she knows that there will never be a place for him in her pack. But is there a place for him with her?

Vale’s books have lots of action, if you like that sort of thing.
 
I do.
 
But you also need to know that Vale's a gorgeous writer. The pack, the place the pack inhabits, the outside world, it’s all fantastically rendered. Throughout each novel in the series, she shows how pack can offer home, stability, and community, but how its very nature can be inclusive, sometimes leaving no place for outsiders like Eyulf. It also often requires great personal sacrifice, even as it gives much.

​Sometimes in romance, the reader is made aware of the tremendous odds facing the main characters, but semi-miraculously, those odds are surmounted in the final pages. Vale does something different, something that I think is braver.

​Not every problem is miraculously erased or overcome in her books.
 
Make no mistake: she writes romances and her characters do end up together, but not always in the ways you’d expect. In that way and others, Maria Vale writes paranormal romances that feel really realistic. Sometimes—a lot of times—we don’t get unqualified happy endings. 
 
Parts of Varya and Eyulf’s story might make you slightly sad; there might even be some disappointment or frustration.

But on balance, Forever Wolf reminds us that there’s no discounting how huge love is, how it can buttress us up even as we’re facing huge change or loss.
 
No, Vale’s books aren't joy-filled romps, and you’ll probably feel like your heart is breaking at least once when you read one, but they are books that are absolutely suffused with love. Are you reading them yet? 

Want more shifter romance? The Naptime Writer also recommends Nalini Singh Psy-Changeling series; Kresley Cole Immortals after Dark series.
 
Q: what's your favorite shifter romance?