A local writer friend of mine has just released her very first novel, the YA urban fantasy Stronger than Blood! I beta-read an early draft of this, and am proud to see it finally getting out into the world. Here’s what I said about it on Goodreads and Amazon:

(Disclaimer: the writer of this book is a friend of mine, and I beta-read this before its release! These remarks are based on my beta-read of the novel.)

Stronger Than Blood does a deft job of avoiding tropes I give the side-eye to in both YA and urban fantasy. It involves high school students, yet it avoids a lot of the angst I’ve seen in other titles I’ve sampled. And it’s urban fantasy with werewolves–but I found the heroine, B, refreshingly atypical. She’s not only not a stereotypical badass, her transformations cause her active, major health problems, and this is one of the neatest explorations of what exactly monthly shapeshifting can do to a body that I’ve had the pleasure to read.

And what does our heroine, B, have to deal with? Discovering that she is not in fact the only werewolf in the world, and that furthermore, the pack she discovers is not plagued with her health issues. But her initial quest to find out whether these other weres can teach her how to not only endure her transformations, but to get her strength back as well, is only the first layer of a nicely complicated little plot. B’s got to maneuver dangerous pack dynamics if she wants to survive not only her own changes, but her new place in a world that contains others like her.

So yeah, go pick this one up. And tell Genevieve I sent you, won’t you?

To which I’ll basically add here that if you like YA, and if you like werewolves, and if you’ve got a Kindle or any of the various Kindle apps, give this ‘un a read! You can find it for sale on Amazon right over here.

And you can follow Genevieve on Twitter here or on tumblr right over here!