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In "Heart" we get to see more of Lissa, who at the start of "Alpha" was expecting to futilely fight to the death, using a big stick because her wolf-self refused to even consider the possibility of fighting the overwhelming Alpha, who intended to kill her young son. (The Alpha never liked him because he has Down Syndrome, but didn't cross the line to murderous until the boy shifted for the first time at ~4 years old.)

At the start of Heart she's safe in her slowly healing pack, and she's officially become the pack's bookkeeper.

This quote sums up the situation pretty well:

"Knowing Shelley, there are cookies [in the bag]. And hopefully the eggs I dutifully hardboiled this morning in an attempt to balance out the impending sugar intake.

That’s me, pack bookkeeper and purveyor of boring snacks.

Not that any of the pups complain. Even eggs are a treat when you've eaten as much rice and beans in your life as they have. Grocery delivery is a highlight of every week, even with Shelley in charge now instead of Rio. I start picking berries again, with more focus this time. The more foraged food we can add to our winter supplies, the less my heart will thump when I add up the grocery bills.

I know we can afford it—the math says so. My heart is still trying to catch up."

Then a visitor reminds her of how pack life used to be, and how it could be again if some of the old, still-hidden wounds were addressed. She hatches a plan to at least start at addressing them, calling it "dropping pebbles in the pond." The plans seem bigger and more terrifying when it comes time to actually execute them, but the results are bigger and better as well.

Content warnings (mostly reassurances):

• Violence: There is an attempt at physical intimidation, a very small amount of serious-but-not-bloody fighting, and lots of sparring and no-claws wrasslin'.

• Sexuality: There is a lot of matter-of-fact nudity, since clothes don't mystically reappear immediately after a shift. However, anatomical details are not provided. There is a lot of non-sexual cuddling, with adults and children all piled together. There is also something ambiguous that happens off-screen between two consenting adults.

• Death: No characters die in the book, but there is discussion of the death of Hayden's father back when he was 10, and the impact it had.

In "Heart" we get to see more of Lissa, who at the start of "Alpha" was expecting to futilely fight to the death, using a big stick because her wolf-self refused to even consider the possibility of fighting the overwhelming Alpha, who intended to kill her young son. (The Alpha never liked him because he has Down Syndrome, but didn't cross the line to murderous until the boy shifted for the first time at ~4 years old.)

At the start of Heart she's safe in her slowly healing pack, and she's officially become the pack's bookkeeper.

This quote sums up the situation pretty well:

"Knowing Shelley, there are cookies [in the bag]. And hopefully the eggs I dutifully hardboiled this morning in an attempt to balance out the impending sugar intake.

That’s me, pack bookkeeper and purveyor of boring snacks.

Not that any of the pups complain. Even eggs are a treat when you've eaten as much rice and beans in your life as they have. Grocery delivery is a highlight of every week, even with Shelley in charge now instead of Rio. I start picking berries again, with more focus this time. The more foraged food we can add to our winter supplies, the less my heart will thump when I add up the grocery bills.

I know we can afford it—the math says so. My heart is still trying to catch up."

Then a visitor reminds her of how pack life used to be, and how it could be again if some of the old, still-hidden wounds were addressed. She hatches a plan to at least start at addressing them, calling it "dropping pebbles in the pond." The plans seem bigger and more terrifying when it comes time to actually execute them, but the results are bigger and better as well.

Content warnings (mostly reassurances):

• Violence: There is an attempt at physical intimidation, a very small amount of serious-but-not-bloody fighting, and lots of sparring and no-claws wrasslin'.

• Sexuality: There is a lot of matter-of-fact nudity, since clothes don't mystically reappear immediately after a shift. However, anatomical details are not provided. There is a lot of non-sexual cuddling, with adults and children all piled together. There is also something ambiguous that happens off-screen between two consenting adults.

• Death: No characters die in the book, but there is discussion of the death of Hayden's father back when he was 10, and the impact it had.

This is a book about shifters, and while it does use "Alpha" to denote the leader of a pack, that's where the similarity to the stereotype of a popular hyper-masculine-and-in-charge Alpha ends.

In "Alpha" we meet Hayden Scott, a young man whose mother was leader of their pack. He was raised with the twin beliefs that everyone in a pack has some way they can contribute and flourish, and that part of an Alpha's role is to help people find and be able to pursue that role.

So when he's outside of his pack's territory and he stumbles across a mother and pup being threatened by a murderous wolf shifter, he doesn't hesitate to defend them. And when he accidentally becomes the new Alpha of her pack by doing so, and discovers that all the women in it have been being systematically abused and controlled by the old Alpha and his lieutenants, he throws himself and all his resources into helping them recover -- and into trying to rehabilitate the lieutenants because despite everything, they're still pack.

An extensive quote, which was really a defining moment that made me certain I'd enjoy this book: "[My mother's pack] has a dozen alpha wolves, but only one of them leads, and I never aspired to be one of them, because that would have meant something awful had happened to my mother and the half-dozen wolves all better qualified than me.

I was okay with that. Modern packs have lots of important roles for those of us with alpha instincts, and I was content with finding the one that suited me best.

But this? This is singing in my veins. My human is still reeling from the changes that just roared into his life, but my wolf is enchanted. I have a pack. A ragged, broken, limping one—but I have a pack, and they’re not all slimed with the ooze of evil. There’s a woman with beautiful green eyes and strength under her fear, and a little boy who owned my heart the first time I heard him growl. They’re not evil and I don’t think they’re broken, either. They’re just afraid, and they have every right to be, but their pack needs them. The web of lines I can see on the back of my eyelids has far too many holes in it already -- and Lissa matters. A lot of those ties run through her. She's important here, even if the asshole who ran things until this morning made her life a living hell for it."

Content warnings (mostly reassurances):

• Violence: The initial fight between Hayden and the old Alpha is pretty intense, and bloody. That's also the last physical fight in the entire book (except for water fights and no-claws wrasslin'). There are no detailed flashbacks to abuse. There's not even any pack hunting of deer or the like.

• Sexuality: There is a lot of matter-of-fact nudity, since clothes don't mystically reappear after a shift. However, anatomical details are not provided. There are a fair number of sexual innuendo jokes (think "That's what she said!" but more original), most of which result in the joker getting poked and/or ignored by the person they were teasing. There is a lot of non-sexual cuddling, with adults and children all piled together.

• Death: No characters die in the book, except for the original Alpha. There is also mention of the pack members the original Alpha killed, including his predecessor.

I very much enjoyed this book, despite all the dark elements that the characters face. It is indeed funny, and the narrative phrasings made me laugh out loud more than once. It's also sad, even heart-wrenching at points. I personally really enjoyed seeing someone with a bad hip/other physical ailments that genuinely seems to affect them all the time, not just when it's convenient to the narrative. And when characters get injured, those injuries matter. And of course I appreciated that there's M/M and F/F relationships in the book, and was glad that if there was more than cuddling going on, it was off-screen and undescribed. She, and all the other characters we get to know well, have moments of strength, and moments of weakness when they rely on others to be strong for them.

I loved how she completed the quest, and I loved the glimpse into her life, and the lives of her travel companions, afterwards.

The author's note, quoted below, contains some very helpful content warnings. "[T]he story involves loss, grief, and unresolved trauma for everyone involved. Some of the characters have anxiety or PTSD and suffer from panic attacks, nightmares, and flashbacks on the page. Some scenes involve physical violence, fire, injury, blood, and death. Additionally, while physical abuse does not occur on the page, it is discussed frequently throughout the story."

In addition to this list, there are a couple of things that are usually big bugaboos of mine, but which were written with such empathy that I was actually pretty okay with them. Spoilers below, so I'm giving a little space if you don't want to read them. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1) Named character death: There's a lot of death, including the on-page death of people we've actually gotten to know a bit. (No-one whose POV we've seen dies).
2) Betrayal: One character does betray the group, but since it's known from the start that he's a plant from their enemy, it's easier for the reader to be emotionally braced by it.

Imogen Grey lives in a fairly dark world setting, where extremely predatory creeps are a dime a dozen. Between the prequel and this book I seriously lost track of the number of times she encountered guys who acted like she was already their property, and just didn't realize it yet. So if that would seriously bug you, even though they do always get smacked down in one way or another, I'd steer clear.

That said, this book also had me laughing, and admiring the number of assumptions the author re-examined when creating this character. For example, why exactly would a millenia-old person know that you currently needed to be 16 in order to drive? Cars have only existed for a century or so, and 12-year-olds regularly drove carts before that.

I loved her creativity in ending fights that weren't in her favor, especially when she doesn't want to kill the opponent. I loved her slowly changing attitude towards the abused, street-wise boy who attached himself to her. I enjoyed her awkward trust of the descendent of a witch who'd helped her decades earlier. I even ended up liking the crotchety old priest who recruits her to help with "exorcisms". And I was delighted by her completely non-romantic, non-sexual relationship with a powerful vampire.

Seriously, the sharp veer away from the usual "instant compelling attraction to the first (and maybe 2nd & 3rd) sexy powerful man" trope that's so common in urban fantasy with female main characters was a breath of fresh air.

And finally, I loved that the book ended on a truly hopeful, potentially life-changing note.

Imogen Grey isn't amazingly smart, and she has no intuition to speak of, but she is faster than a vampire, stronger than a shifter, and more immortal than...well...anything. Literally nothing will kill her, and having lived as a young woman since the dawn of civilization or so, she's gotten tired or it. Or more accurately, she's gotten tired of pain, because being able to regenerate doesn't mean the injury & healing process doesn't hurt.

It's actually fairly difficult to summarize this book and world setting quickly. It's definitely an urban fantasy book, but she mostly tries to avoid the supernatural elements of it as being Not Worth the Trouble. She's living as part of the human world, and that's where the plot takes place. In some ways Imogen is like the threefold law personified: The more sheer yuck you put out into the world, the harder she'll come down if she has to deal with you, and the more you're genuninely trying to help the world, the more likely it is that she'll help you before moving on.

The one thing that really niggled at me is that there are multiple unrelated villains, but they're all predatorily misogynistic men. The only exception is a guy that's more of an annoyance than a full-out bad guy, because he's more of a snot than a predator, and slightly more ageist than misogynistic. But it's a fast-paced prequel, with not a lot of time for development of secondary characters, and even less for the bad guys. There's no hint that anyone from this prequel will carry over into the series

Note: This review is for the book version by Drew Hayes, not the audiobook version.

I was a tiny bit worried this book would be flooded with self-depreciation and/or just teasing a lot of actually interesting events, but it's hilarious.

At the start of the book Fred is a quiet, bookish, sweater-vest-wearing (vampire) accountant who decides to not only go to his 10-year high school, but to Be Spontaneous while there. He even books the hotel for 4 days, and carefully packs 4 clean changes of clothing, plus 4 days worth of blood, to give himself ample room for Spontaneity.

By the end of the book he's got an eclectic group of friends and they get together regularly to drink their beverages of choice (wine, beer, and soda), and play non-scored Scrabble. (It's not specified that it's non-scored, but with him playing words like "periodontist" and the other two thinking carefully before playing short, 4-letter words, there's clearly no point.)

The world building is excellent, and more than once what looked like a humorous throwaway line actually comes back to be an important plot element. There's not a lot of wasted text or events, but it all flows very smoothly. I laughed a lot, and quoted a lot of lines at my spouse, and already have the sequel on my to-buy list.

My only quibble is that it sometimes I think the author is stretching their vocabulary too far. There's a few phrases such as "he was donned in armor" where you can get the meaning, but it's the totally wrong word, and it makes you wonder whether it was caused by overly-generous thesaurus use, or a re-phrased sentence that didn't get copy-edited correctly.

With the back-of-the-book description I was expecting the main character's struggles with the old man & with magic in general to be the main focus, but those were nearly non-events.

Instead, I got a cozy with 4 main plots:

• A grasping niece trying to steal the estate by getting the old man declared incompetent

• An old man trying to find a blood relative with magical talent to take over the house when he dies

• A cursed artifact that is trying to hasten that death, or at least senility as it steals the old man's memories, and

• The main character discovering both enjoyment and satisfaction in the quiet duties and accomplishments of being a butler, much to his mother's relief given that his previous jobs had been very adrenaline-fueled and notably dangerous.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I'm sort of glad a sequel doesn't actually exist yet because I think a sequel would necessarily have a different feel and I don't want to move on from the comfy mental spot this one put me in.

Astra winds up getting yanked out of her home dimension, and traveling through a a bunch of other dimensions trying to get home. Some of the worlds belong to other authors (Seanan Mcguire's Velveteen, used with her permission, and one in the universe of the webcomic Grrlpower, which Dave Barrack co-authored). The rest are parallel universes of Hope's own, but with historical differences that make those world much worse off.

I found myself really enjoying most of* the ones where the author was writing in another person's universe, and grinding through the ones that were just close parallels. The not-very subtle message was that Astra's home, which I've complained in other reviews was getting excessively grimdark, was actually the Best of All Possible Worlds because any changes would make things So Much Worse.

*(The exception was the one where it was written as a stage play, specifically Midsummer's Night Dream. I ended up skipping that chapter.)

I also really disliked the chapter narrated by Artemis, which explored her life in New Orleans and assumed the reader had already read her standalone short story which, like "Omega Night", is not listed in the main chronology. It also had nothing to do with the main story until the last couple of pages.

And after the main story's done there's a short story by K. F. Lim set in the normal universe, wherein Astra briefly teams up with that author's original characters. I gave up on it after the 2nd time the POV character, a part-time mermaid, had to hide behind a towel (held by young men who were averting their eyes) in order to pull on a fresh tankini bottom because her transformation destroys them. Apparently neither the character nor the person shelling out for all these swimsuit bottoms has ever heard of a skirt.

After book #4, I had pretty low expectations for this one. But it turned out to be really, really good. I loved it.

In this book, Astra & co go (uninvited) to Japan. Japan's method of dealing with supers is very different from the US, and more than a little affected by manga & anime. All supers are required to required to register with the government and undergo training, and all superhero teams are sponsored by the government. Anyone who doesn't register is called a ronin, and can be arrested on sight. Both heroes and ronin have fan clubs that gleefully dissect every scrap of news media about them, must like like modern idol groups.

(All this isn't just because the goverment feels like it -- the country is regularly besieged by kaiju and other threats. It needs a strong, coordinated defense.)

But Hope's life seems to depend on finding someone who seems to be hiding in Japan, so after a conversation that Never Happened with a high-ranking US government official she decides to infiltrate Japan. Of course her closest friends insist on coming with her, and the team "mislays" some very useful resources in her direction.

While in Japan, then help. They make up secret ronin identities, and when they run across a problem they do what they can to help. It just... feels good? Feels lighter than the other books? There's no angry protests against supers, or demagogues stirring up hate. There's no wondering if friends are secretly traitors. There's no impossible crush to angst over. There is, however, much fun with Japanese idol culture.

Overall it just feels like a good, hopeful superhero story, and when it's over, it's done. Officially the Japanese government has no idea who these Three Remarkable Ronin were, though clearly they perished in valiantly defending the country and so their memory should be honored. And also clearly these three lost American tourists should be returned home with no fuss.

This is book #4 in the series, but it's not the fourth part. Apparently there's a short story, "Omega Night", and it contained both plot and character developments that significantly impact this book. However, even on the official author's website it's not listed between books 3 and 4. It's listed after the final book, among other "related works".

And the author doesn't really do a good job of recapping what happened, it's just an abrupt jump, and now Hope/Astra's angsting over a new crush that started during that book, freaking out over a danger to one of her friends that's due to events in that book, and a number of other sudden changes.

And these changes continue to casually come up over the course of the entire book, so that put a serious damper on my enjoyment of it.

Beyond that, the premise/setting was unique and somewhat interesting, but a lot of it felt like repeating "same song, different verse." Just marking things off a checklist. Astra has a crush that she doesn't want to act on (thankfully not the same one as at the end of book #3). Astra asks for advice, then ignores it in a way that could cause trouble for the one who gave it. Astra manages to get separated from her team (but thankfully not abducted this time). Astra makes mistakes and spends time berating herself. Important rules get massively broken but a loophole means it's okay. And the Perfect Defenses get destroyed via the most plausible method, which somehow no-one saw coming.

I did really like that, after introducing a terrifying Islamic terrorist supervillain in book #1, the author chose to introduce a character that showcases the more peaceful side of Islam. I wish the character was ongoing, but it doesn't look like he will be.

I really didn't like the friend drama for this book - it felt pretty contrived, but Astra was utterly poleaxed. Honestly, the number of times something relatively trivial knocks Astra so off her stride that she can't think straight for several days should probably be cause for serious concern among the team leadership.