WEREling (ARC review)

Wereling by Steve Feasey

Synopsis (Product Description):
Fourteen-year-old Trey Laporte is not a kid anymore. Not after the day he wakes up in agony—retina-splitting, vomit-inducing agony. His clothes are torn. His room is trashed.

Enter Lucien Charron, the mysterious, long-lost “uncle” with freakish fire-flecked eyes and skin that blisters in the sun. Suddenly, Trey finds himself living in a luxury penthouse at the heart of a strange and sinister empire built on the powers of the Netherworld—vampires, demons, sorcerers, and djinn.

And there is a girl—Alexa Charron—who is half vampire, half human, and insanely pretty, with powers all of her own. Trey is falling for her.

Trey is training night and day to control the newly discovered power lurking inside him. Now, demons are closing in on every side, and the most psychopathic bloodsucker to rock the Netherworld wants to destroy him. Above all, he must face one terrifying question: Is he a boy . . . or is he a beast?

Review:
Reading this book made me feel like I was in a dream like state the whole time.  I think the cause of this was the way the story moved along so quickly.  Don’t get me wrong, WEREling is a fun, energetic read, that threatens to consume you, but as fast as it can enthrall you, it also has quite a few elements that are so common/predictable that you are likely to forget the story once you put it down, just like you might forget a dream once you wake up.

Another part of the reason for the dream like state is the way the book opens.  Trey awakens in pain and is not able to remember anything from the night before. He finds that his bedroom has been completely trashed, his shoes are shredded, and he is naked.  Before he is able to fully evaluate what might have occurred, a stranger named Lucien arrives at the care home where the teenager lives to claim that he knew Trey’s parents and, with very little effort, to whisk Trey away from the facility.

Soon after, Trey discovers that Lucien is a vampire, who is disgustingly wealthy and has an untold amount of resources at his disposal.  Trey also learns that Lucien’s intent is to protect Trey against those that would seek to harm him for being a rare form of Lycan.  During his induction into his new life, Trey meets the attractive Alexa (Lucien’s daughter) and the elusive Tom (Lucien’s human aid).    

When Trey is not sleeping, being a wolf takes a lot out of you, he is being guided/trained by Lucien on how to control the transformation process and bimorph into a half-man, half-wolf creature.

Trey’s biggest threat is the vampire who killed his parents, Caliban (Lucien’s brother).  Before Trey is ready, Alexa is kidnapped and Trey is forced to face Caliban to save her life.

Although by the end of the book Lucien has proved that he did have Trey’s best interest at heart, something about the defanged and declawed vampire didn’t sit well with me.  He kind of creeped me out the whole time and I was kind of expecting him to turn out to be the bad guy.

I was surprised to see Trey muse over the idea of being in love with Alexa since very little character development was spent on her, and since they really didn’t spend any meaningful time together.  To me, she appeared to be a kind of faceless, superficial being.  That said, Trey falling for her seemed to superficial as well, stemming out of her ‘good looks,’ which was disappointing, but probably typical for a teenaged boy.

The epilogue was a bit unsatisfying mainly because it didn’t really feel like an epilogue: Lucien is on his death bed and Alexa and Trey decide they must find him a cure.  More questions are presented and it is obvious the series will continue in an mysterious, action filled fashion.

0 comments

Posted at 8:12 pm  •  Labels: 2010, 3 stars, ARC, Book it Forward, Book Review, Vampires, werewolves, YA