Once "Bitten", and twice mad, according to Kelley Armstrong

"Bitten" asks us what it would take to forgive a betrayal from the one you love.  Elena Michaels didn't start out as the most trusting person, having been bounced from one foster home to the next.  But she thought she knew enough about Clayton Danvers that she wouldn't have to worry about that.  She was all set to marry him when she found out he had been keeping a secret from her - the secret that he (along with the family he had introduced her to and asked her to join)  was a werewolf.  Of course, he didn't just come out and tell her about it over a good cup of coffee or anything.  No, he bites her instead, turning her into one of them.


This story actually begins years after the bite has taken place.  Elena wants nothing to do with Clayton or the pack of mostly biological werewolves in upstate New York.  She is living in Toronto, with a man she appreciates for his kindness, but does not love.  She knows that Clayton is still holding out hope that she will return to him, but she is still beyond furious at him for lying, and turning her without her permission.


A few non-pack werewolves, not too affectionately refereed to as mutts, begin a violent campaign against the pack and Elena is forced back to the pack's home for her own safety.  Once away from the big city where she has to hide what she is, and surrounded by good friends (who happen to be werewolves), the conflict Elena is trying to avoid comes back to her full force.  Because, though she's furious with Clayton for biting her, she actually loves the freedom that comes from being in wolf form.  She loves hunting down deer with her pack.  She loves the family that the pack welcomed her into, without reservation.  She loves the heightened senses and skills being a were gives her.  Most of all, and much to her distress, she truly does love Clayton Danvers, and it is when his life is put in danger that she finds she can't hide from her feelings any longer and must decide if she can put her hurt feelings aside long enough to save his life.


Elena's passionate nature makes it easy to understand how she can go from hating Clayton one second, to sleeping with him the next.  But it makes it difficult to understand how she managed to survive years of hiding who she was, and running from her own feelings.  True, as passionate as she is in her love for Clayton, she is just as passionate in her need to make him hurt as much as she felt she had been hurt.  So you could almost see her distance as a way of torturing him.  However, it seems rather difficult for a person to lead a passionless life built on the passionate anger she felt at the time she initially left the pack.  While this inconsistency doesn't detract too much from the flow of the story, it does make one question the motives of our protagonist, and it doesn't inspire much confidence for the series.