Reviewed by Jen
TITLE: Undesirable
SERIES: Creekside Valley #3
AUTHOR: J.T. Fader
PUBLISHER: Love Lane Books
LENGTH: 163 pages
RELEASE DATE: December 25, 2025
BLURB:
He was raised to believe he was unclean, but the beast inside refused to die.
Jesse’s past is carved into his soul—a memory of a life he’s been trying to outrun. As a bear shifter raised in a cult that forbade him from shifting, he was taught to abhor his own nature.
When his parents sent him to a gay conversion therapy camp after finding male-on-male porn in his browser history, it broke what was left of his spirit.
He learned early that love could wound deeper than any claw.
Now free but fractured, Jesse numbs the pain with booze, drugs, and selling himself to stay alive. When he moves to Creekside with his best friends, he hopes for peace—quiet nights, clean air, and no memories. But peace doesn’t last long when his addictions catch up to him.
Then Lucas enters the picture after a wild night in Metro City. A wolf shifter with an easy smile, Lucas is everything Jesse wants to avoid—kind, curious, dangerously sincere, and innocent.
But in a town where the forest hums peacefully and calmly, with Lucas at the helm, even a broken bear might learn what it means to be loved—if he’s brave enough to stop running.
Gritty, emotional, and intimate, Undesirable is a shifter romance about survival, the anguish of addiction, and the quiet strength it takes to let someone love you.
REVIEW:
We finally get to Jesse’s story, the Alpha of the threesome of Carter and Rory. At this point, we pretty much know Jesse’s backstory, although we get a few more details and explanation for his addictions. He’s a bear shifter who was basically forced to endure conversion therapy/torture growing up to avoid shifting. Then, him being gay pretty much sealed the deal of him being thrown out of the “family.” While on the streets, he turned to prostitution/porn and drugs with the one paying for the other into a vicious cycle. Through it all though, he took care of Carter and Rory.
Even though the three moved to the country and to Creekside, while the other two seem to have flourished and made lives for themselves, Jesse is stuck in the same debilitating cycle. He does drugs to forget the past and pain, does the porn and prostitution (allowing himself to endure some pretty nasty stuff at that) to pay for the drugs. He seems to have come to grips with his relationship with Carter being relegated to bffs, but having not really faced his past trauma is causing some major problems.
Lucas, having taken over leadership of the pack after Maddox stepped down to be with Rory, has a crazy one-night stand with Jesse that leads to them being married, a la Hangover style without the humor. Lucas decides he sees something more in Jesse and doesn’t want to give up on them having a chance. They face many challenges, i.e. wolf shifter v. bear shifter, the pack accepting a bear shifter and alpha at that, the drug issue, etc. They have some understandable setbacks, but Lucas doesn’t give up and it works out in the end.
This was my least favorite of the series. Many aspects mentioned above seemed to be pretty big problems but the way the story was written, it almost felt shallow or not matching the intensity of the problems, especially the bear/wolf and drug addiction aspects. This world also contains mpreg, which, thankfully for me, doesn’t go into much detail other than they have pups/cubs and interspecies are obviously unable to procreate. I did like the solution for Carter and Jesse to have kids which seemed to be a good outcome for both couples.
All in all, I enjoyed this series, but it doesn’t ever get too deep, even this installment, which I would have expected more from given the content. This was definitely an interesting world and had a lot of unique aspects to it, and I am looking forward to reading more from this author.
RATING: 
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