Monday, June 20, 2011

The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group by Catherine Jinks

The Abused Werewolf Support Group is about a boy named Toby who wakes up in a Dingo pen one morning. As this isn’t typical behavior on his part, his mother takes him for all kinds of tests. Then one day a boy and a priest show up at his door telling Toby and his mother that he is a werewolf. At first Toby doesn’t believe anything they tell him and thinks the whole thing is a crazy practical joke. Then Toby is kidnapped for a werewolf fighting pit and he slowly comes to realize that maybe he is in fact a werewolf.

When I first started reading this I was super excited and quickly became very confused. I thought this was going to be Rueben’s side of the story from The Reformed Vampire Support Group. Then as I read on I kind of realized that that definitely was not the case and had to kind of reorient my expectations.

Once I wrapped my head around the fact that this was Toby’s story and not Rueben’s I was able to enjoy it. Toby is a funny and interesting kid whose creativity and sense of adventure can often get him into way too much trouble. I really liked his character (but maybe that’s cause he reminds me of my fiancĂ© with the crazy experiments). He makes a lot of bad decisions and lets himself get talked into things by Fergus way too easily. I have to say that I loved Toby’s ingenuity. I couldn’t wait to see what he was going to come up with next. Some of the things he was able to build were just incredible and there was a part of me that was tempted to go online and see if some of the science experiments (for lack of a better term) would really work.

The story was definitely interesting and I wanted to know what was going to happen next. I also loved getting to find out what was going on with the crew from the Reformed Vampire Support Group although there was a lack of Dave I found disappointing. I also thought the ending was very creative. I always love stories that are kind of written as a “warning”. For some reason I just find it very entertaining and I like the reassurances Toby gave, that if help was needed they would find you.

My only other complaint about this book was that there was too much tell rather then show. Toby is telling the story in retrospect and because of that he would constantly tell you how he would never behave this way now and the different kinds of decisions that he would make now. I wish the author had let us see a little more clearly the life Toby was living after his adventures, so that we could see for ourselves how he was different and not have to be told that Toby no longer takes crazy risks.

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