Reviewed by Carissa

 

TITLE:  Wild Rose, Silent Snow

 

AUTHOR:  Angel Martinez

 

PUBLISHER:  Amber Quill Publishing

 

LENGTH:  150 pages

 

BLURB:  

 

Content with the quiet isolation of their lake house, Snowden and Rowan Hadley survive on summer jobs and winter hunting, unable to move on since their parents died. Their peace, however, is shattered by a strange, human-acclimated bear who insists on following Rowan like a giant hunting dog, and then again by the discovery of a naked, surly stranger in the snow.

 

Both bear and man lead the Hadley brothers into a strange, surreal world where sorcery and RPG software intertwine. Curses and magical traps lie in wait around every turn. Rowan and Snowden will need to adjust their view of how the world works, and quickly, if they want to live through the process of rescuing their enchanted princes.

 

REVIEW:  

 

Snowden and Rowan Hadley have been surviving, barely, since their parents both died in an accident a few years ago. Living out in the wilds of Montana, the two brothers get by on what they can hunt in the woods around their home, the proceeds of their mother’s honey farm, and the kindness of a few neighbors.  Life isn’t exactly thrilling, and it is usually pretty tough, but both Snow and Ro are intent on making their way thru the winter, even if it is by the skin of their teeth.

 

When Snow notices that there are bear tracks circling the house, they call in the Rangers, but there isn’t much that they can do when there is no bear actually there for them to deal with.  Then Ro gets rather up close and personal with the bear…and things take a turn for the weird.  Not only is the bear oddly docile, but he seems to take to human commands a lot better than the average bear.  And Ro…well he seems to take to the bear a lot more than the average human (at least those ones not with a death wish).

 

Neither Snow nor Ro were expecting to find a naked man in the woods a few weeks later.  And neither Ro nor Snow were expecting to find that friendly bears were only the tip of this weirdly magical iceberg.  It is a good thing that neither one of the brothers is all that normal either.

 

Once I decided to just enjoy the story, and not worry overmuch about the practically (or reality) of some parts of this book, I found I enjoyed it quite a bit.  It was a quick, easy read, and I really enjoyed Ro’s voice in this story–we do get a bit from Cade’s perspective, but not all that much.  I liked the isolated aspects of this setting as well, as it reflected nicely on just how insular these brothers are, and how they have to rely on themselves for almost everything.

 

I did have a hard time at first understanding the why exactly Snow spoke as he did, but once I got that it was because of something in his head, and not just a weird speaking pattern, things were a bit easier.  I think I would have enjoyed seeing Snow’s (and Griffin’s) bits of the story, but their bits of it blended nicely with Ro and Cade.

 

And Cade the Bear was just awesome.  Loved the whole bear-shifter/curse aspect, and I really saw a lot of human-Cade in bear-Cade…which is probably good since Cade spends a good deal of the book in fur and claws instead of skin and clothes.  And while I am kinda sure (in fact I am absolutely sure) that you shouldn’t be bringing random bears into your home, no matter how tame they seem, it did a lot to show the growing interest between Ro and the bear–just not in any untoward way, if you know what I mean.  Ro saves that for when Cade has (slightly) less fur.

 

I did feel that the whole relationship thing between Ro and Cade (and Snow and Griffin) happened a bit fast.  I mean, two-thirds of the time Cade was a bear.  There isn’t exactly a lot of relationship building going on when every conversation involves growling and pushing around letter-magnets.  And Snow and Griffin barely said more than a handful of words to each other, and yet they seem to be madly in love by the end of the book.  Suspension of reality, and all that jazz, can handle some of this, but it was really starting to push it a bit.

 

But this was a cute story, and I did really enjoy it.  If it didn’t make me sound even freakier than I normally come across as, I would say that I would have like for Cade the bear to stick around all the time.  He was just too cute.  But then again, not a lot of relationships flourish when one of the participants is an animal.  Would love to see a story from Snow and Griffin’s povs, though. It would be a lot of fun.

 

RATING:  

 

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