⭐⭐⭐
After receiving a copy for free from Aidy Award's newletter, I decided to pick it up as a quick palate cleanser. Flirty Wolf is a short story set during her Alpha Wolves Want Curves series, but I'm not sure where it sits in the order. This worked perfect to start my Bang in the Night challenge and I used it to cover Howlin' For You (shifter romance). For Bang in the Night I have decided to choose a theme song from one of the five Reprise Rarities albums by Frank Sinatra that released in 2020 and 2021. I chose Everybody Ought To Be In Love off of Volume 3. I also used Flirty Wolf to cover Fall in Love's prompt new-to-you author and Color Me Romantic's prompt Lavender (insta-love story).
Poppy, a librarian, is headed to a charity bachelor auction to benefit not only her library, but banned books as well. When she sees Harley on stage, a man she's had a crush on, she can't believe that he would be flirty with her to get her bid. When she ends up winning his bid, she quickly finds out that he's actually a wolf shifter and they are mates.
Oh wow, this was a quick and funky little novella. I enjoyed the way that we had a werewolf hero that was into his curvy mate, but I feel like the biggest issue I had was with the development of the characters and the plot. Now this was under 100 pages. Poppy has a lot of body insecurities and I feel like with how short this was there really wasn't the time that was needed to really see her work through, or even start to work through, her confidence issues. There were a couple times where she was saying one thing but thinking something else and instead of it feeling like she was in conflict with herself, it just felt weird. Then we get the sudden reveal that most of the people in the strip club, oh that's right - the auction is being held at the local strip club, know about shifters and they assumed that Poppy does as well. She rightly freaks out, but then ends up running to the bathroom (instead of outside) where she meets a woman that has a box of donuts (yes, in the bathroom) and they become a metaphor for her life and give her the confidence to become mated to Harley. I'm sure that sounds janky and weird, but I have to tell you, the novella was janky and weird. Honestly I probably should've rated it lower, but I was feeling nice and didn't want to give it 2-stars.
Despite the disappointment I felt reading this, I wasn't expecting too much since I hadn't read Aidy Award before and this was a free novella I got from her newsletter. I am interested in checking out one of her full length books to see how that develops. I just feel like when you're going for a shorter novella and it's also something that is being marketed to readers to get interested in your books, it should be kept a little bit simpler. There is some leeway for the insta-love novellas, but if you cram too much into it and nothing really fells like it got resolved (or resolved well) then it can be hard to retain readership; at least from my experience. We'll see when I try out one of her other books.
Have you read Flirty Wolf?
Bookishly Yours,
Stasi🍎
STATISTICS: Flirty Wolf, Aidy Award, 3-stars, 0 days, eBook, 91 pages, published in 2019, indie published
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