Raised by Wolves by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I really wanted to like this book. I'd seen several authors that I really enjoy mention it was their favorite young adult book in a while. Sadly, I didn't enjoy it. I almost gave up reading it about 75 pages from the end.

Here's the thing, it's not bad. It would be easier for me to say that the book was really awful and I hated it. That's not the case. Overall I just found it really mediocre. The problems started pretty early. There's not much world building going on, and the stuff that is there was way too similar to the work that Patricia Briggs did in the Mercy Thompson books. If anything, for a good portion of the book I felt like I was reading a young adult Mercy book. The main character is an outsider being raised by werewolves, she's having a hard time dealing with pack bonds in her head, and she doesn't play by the pack dominance rules. My problem was that I wasn't very original. I couldn't get the Briggs similarities out of my mind.

It wasn't until the final conflict and resolution of the book that I really connected with the character and story. It was those last 75 pages that I almost didn't finish that made me think the book was okay. Barnes does some interesting things with the idea of chosen family verses biological family (in this case, the pack would take the place of the biological family). It just happens too late in the book to really elevate this beyond just another teen werewolf book.