Book Review: Owl Be Bear For You By DJ Jennings

 

Book Description

Hot summer fun where you’ll change…in more ways than one.

Librarian Mara Scioto lives a nice, neat, orderly existence—except when she’s being attacked by uncontrolled male shifters who need to mate.

Pesky little detail, right?

Raised by a grandmother who hates all shifters, she has one wish: to make it past the age of twenty-five without experiencing The Morph that tells you you’re one of them.

And then the letter from Camp Shifter arrives with her name on it...

Orthopedic surgeon in training Jack Karsten is waiting to see if he’ll follow in his shifter brother’s footsteps. Being a shifter won’t be so bad, if that’s his destiny, but when he meets Mara, he realizes that fate and love don’t always align.

But love always wins.

It can be a bear of an ordeal sorting it all out, but if anyone can help, it’s the staff at Camp Shifter. While they’ll train Jack and Mara on the ways of shifter life, there’s one thing they can’t teach them:

How to get out of their own way and let love leave them changed.

Forever.

My Review

In this story shifters are a known thing because some humans shift by their 25th birthday. If you can make it past your 25th birthday then you are safe from shifting and becoming a shifter. Mara is a librarian and doesn't like shifters ever since she was attacked by a newly shifted bear shifter and badly hurt. Once a human shifts, if they aren't quickly picked up by the authorities and taken to shifter camp to learn to deal with their new existence, they can turn on any humans that are around them. The animal part takes over and they want to mate right away and if they can't, they get aggressive and can even attack and really hurt or even kill a human. Some humans know they are about to shift and they voluntarily go to camp shifter before they shift for the first time so they don't accidentally hurt someone. 

Jack is an Orthopedic surgeon and asks Mara out. But while they're out on a date something bad almost happens and Jack is taken away to camp shifter. Mara gets a letter soon after and she is to report to camp shifter before her next birthday because she's going to shift but she doesn't understand how they could possibly know that. She thinks the grandmother who raised her is going to hate her because she hates shifters. But when she tells her grandmother about the letter, long lost family secrets rise to the surface. 

At first I thought I was going to enjoy this book and then the whole story took a huge turn and everything was about sex. The story and storyline that had been interesting and the budding relationship between Mara and Jack turned into a lust-fest because if shifters don't have enough sex they can't control their animals. Newly turned males will attack any female that happens to be around them in order to get sex because the drive to mate is so strong they can't control themselves which is why Mara had been attacked. You would think if this is the case that every male who is about to turn 25 would have to he held behind bars just in case they turn to save other humans from being mauled but that isn't the case. 

Camp shifter is all about teaching new shifters to have lots of sex. It seemed like the storyline just disappeared once there and the overwhelming urge to mate was all that mattered and that bothered me. I don't mind an insta-lust type romance storyline but there has to be more than the urge to mate that makes two people fall for each other in order for me to feel like the romance was worth reading. 

This was not for me. 

I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.

Amazon