Breaking Badger by Shelly Laurenston: review

3/5 stars on Goodreads

Breaking Badger by Shelly Laurenston

I’m a fan of Laurenston’s work as G. A. Aiken, all those dragons and especially the Scarred Earth Saga. But Breaking Badger is the first book as Laurenston that I’ve read. It’s the book four of Honey Badger Chronicles urban fantasy series about batshit crazy honey badger shifter women, with some romance thrown in the mix.

The book description (and cover) is highly misleading. This isn’t a paranormal romance, and it doesn’t merely follow the two persons mentioned there, Mads and Finn. It most assuredly isn’t a cutesy book, like it gives to understand (“utterly irresistible kitty-cat”, lol). And it isn’t a stand-alone, like paranormal romances often are, even when they’re part of a series.

There’s a large cast of characters that each get screen time, plus a bunch of other characters that only make brief appearances for a point of view change. The main trio, Charlie, Max, and Stevie, are sisters with a traumatic past. Their stories were told in the first three books, but they continue here too. Mads is Max’s friend since school and they play pro basketball together, with three more women who also feature heavily here. Finn (as far as I know, not having read the first books) and his brothers make their first appearance here.

None of the characters are introduced properly. I have no idea how old they are or what they look like, let alone more important things, like their backstories. Much of what I know about them is conjecture, though I did read the prologues of the earlier books just to make a bit more sense of what was happening here.

Mads, a honey badger, has been abused by her hyena family all her life. Basketball is the only thing that matters to her, as is her team, which doubles as a tactical unit that kill those who abuse shifters. She’s an efficient killer, but the mere mention of her family makes her lock up. One storyline follows her finally standing up to them. But since this isn’t a cutesy romance, it’s done with a wholesale butchering, not with handholding and hugs.

Finn is a Siberian tiger, huge and lethal. He’s trying to find out who killed his father, a mystery that no one seems willing to talk about. In a cast of characters of borderline psycopaths, he’s sort of steady and normal. Mads catches his attention and the ‘romance’ sort of happens from there. In the end, the best that can be said about it is that he has a steadying influence on her.

There’s a lot going on in this book. All sort of plotlines and events that either continue from the earlier books or spring up out of blue here. Some of them are seen to their conclusion, one way or another, some aren’t. We don’t learn who killed Finn’s father, for example, and we don’t see the consequences of Mads standing up to her family. Some events are ignored completely. Like, no one seems to care who lured the honey badgers and tigers to a trap in order to butcher them all.

What this book has is batshit craziness from start to finish. At first I tried to keep up, but in the end I just let the book take me on a ride. It’s a highly entertaining ride too, if you have a high tolerance for graphic violence for comedic effect. The honey badgers are a bunch of violent psychopaths (no matter what Max’s shrinks claim), and there’s absolutely no predicting their reactions to any given situation. But I loved them all, how they’re allowed to be exactly like they are, and not ‘softened’ by love or other conventions of romance. They’re not apologising and they’re not going to change.

Unfortunately the mayhem isn’t quite enough to make this a great book. There’s no emotional payback. The romance is very low-key, and Mads dealing with her family isn’t really dealt with either. There’s a lot of action and then the book just ends.

Since this a middle book in an ongoing series, I presume that everything will continue in the next book. If it fell into my hands, I’d read it, but I won’t go out of my way to get it. Meanwhile, I’ll just wait for the next G. A. Aiken book. We’re due a new Scarred Earth Saga, aren’t we?

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.