Book review: The Trouble with Fate by Leigh Evans

Before I start, I want to give a reading update that won’t be included on my review at Goodreads. I’d said a few times in previous posts that the two books I was reading weren’t very good, so you might be wondering “Zoe, did you change your mind?” No, I changed books and started reading this instead. I’ll go back to the others soon enough, but I figure, why not have a positive review every once in a while?

So, The Trouble with Fate is about Hedi Peacock, or Helen Stronghold from her old life. Hedi has had it rough because she watched both her parents get killed, and her twin brother was stolen by the fae and carried to their dimension while she was left alone in a burning house. Being half fae and half werewolf, she’s a hunted abomination, and so she’s spent most of her life on the run from werewolves, and from humans. Her only companions are Lou, her full fae princess aunt, and Merry, a fae spirit trapped inside an amulet.

Working as a barista for Starbucks, she’s rudely surprised by the return of Robson Trowbridge, a werewolf who she’d had a crush on as a child. His presence leads to her losing her job, and she goes home to discover Lou missing. She learns from the landlord that her aunt has had a nervous breakdown, leading to the police arresting Lou and taking her to the hospital. Hedi returns home, only to discover a werewolf hunting for her. And things get steadily worse from there when the same pack of wolves kidnaps Lou from the hospital. The wolves claim to want Merry, but Hedi sees photos of the amulet they want, and she’s seen it before…hanging around Trowbridge’s neck.

Hedi sets out to steal it and fails, and a raid by the wolf pack forces the two into a partnership. As the story plays out, the two get closer to each other, and closer to uncovering the werewolves’ reasons for wanting the amulet.

For the most part, I enjoyed this story, and I’m already looking forward to reading the sequel, The Thing about Wolves. Hedi is an interesting character, being short and rubenesque instead of the typical thin Minnie PR heroine. Trowbridge is kind of a stereotypical PR bad boy, but at least his reasons for being so broken make sense and help to flesh out his character.

However, there’s a couple things that bugged me about the story. The first is that the world building seems to be all about penalizing supernaturals to make them kind of pathetic. Hedi can’t use her magic without causing herself physical harm, and she can’t let humans touch her because “there’s a law” that makes it painful for skin to skin contact. Oh, but werewolves aren’t a part of this particular law, BUT there is a law on the werewolf side that says fae and wolves shouldn’t interbreed. Oy vey.

Werewolves aren’t really that big of a deal either because they have so many limitations. Hedi has even more limitations because she’s a little of both. So for a fantasy, there’s a lot of “no you can’t” that makes the supernatural races less interesting to me. I don’t want to imagine being these people. I feel sorry for them being saddled by so many rules that seem to exist strictly to cause more pain. It’s like the author thought, “How else can I torture these people? Oh! I’ve got it! MORE RULES!”

The other problem is the sex. The author goes into explicit awkward detail for sex that goes badly, and yet the follow up encounters that supposedly go better are just two-sentence knock-offs with no detail. It’s frustrating that the writer wanted to show only the lousy sex in all its detail, but then clams up on details about good sex.

These are actually minor complaints, and so I give The Trouble with Fate four stars and would recommend it to fans of paranormal fiction who’d like to read about a heroine who isn’t a stick-thin supermodel. Just keep in mind, the one halfway decent sex scene in the book will dump a bucket of cold water on you right when things were getting interesting.