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Danielle's Reading Adventures

Reading is my favorite hobby, hands down. Books are love to me.  I am an avid collector, and paper books will always edge out e-books with me.

The Changelings: Firestorm - Various I am a huge fan of shapeshifter stories, so I volunteered to review this anthology. I thought it was a good idea to build stories around the theme of either fires or shapeshifters, or both, for the cause of National Disaster Relief. Let me start by saying, I am not much of a reader of erotic romance, so it was a different experience to read stories that are primarily erotic encounters in the romance genre. It takes a good writer to make a sex scene interesting, and the writers in this anthology definitely accomplished this.Because these are very short stories, there is not much character development. However, I found the characters to be written in such a way that you did get a handle on their personalities. I believed each author worked hard to have characters that were three-dimensional and not just cardboard people to be utilized merely to build sexual encounters around. To do so in just a few pages takes writing skill that was very evident in these stories. Also, there were characters in these stories that were heroes in their own ways, whether it be fire-fighters, doctors, or law enforcement agents.I must say that I have a lot of admiration for the writers of the stories in this anthology. They all showed great imagination and managed to write very interesting stories that incorporated shapeshifter. They also managed to challenge my perceptions of what a shapeshifter was and what could be done with shapeshifter characters in a story. I used to primarily think of shapeshifters as werewolves. This is really just scratching the surface. There were wolves, panthers, cats, dogs, horses, and a duck. My favorite stories in the collection are: “Wolf Style” by BJ McCall, “Britta’s Beast” by Kate Winter, “Firehorse” by Mary Winter, “Shifting Priorities” by Anne Kane, and “Mating Fever” by Selena Illyria. I liked these stories best because they were set around my favorite themes of wolves, a valkyrie, horses, and mated couples, or were just so different that they stood out in my mind.I love the concept of having one true mate, and a lot of the stories in this anthology used this theme in their storylines. Another thing I liked about this anthology was the creativity behind the storytelling. The settings run the gamut from Hell to other planets, to space stations in far-away galaxies. In fact, with each story I read, I was wondering what intriguing concept the next talented author would come up with. I was not disappointed.In closing, reading The Changelings: Firestorm is a lot of fun for the brave readers who like their sex spicy and non-vanilla and, are open minded about reading a few stories same sex encounters. Although not all the sexual encounters were my cup of tea, I could find enjoyment in the writing and the creativity of the settings and characters used. Most of all, I appreciated that pretty much all the stories involved people who were in love, on the pathway to being in love, or were looking for a commitment or were expressing their commitment to their partner. If a reader does not care to read sexual encounters that are outside of the more mainstream sensual romance boundaries, they may want to look elsewhere. Otherwise, dive into the world of changelings.Reviewed for Bitten by Books