Title: Claire de Lune
(3.5 out of 5)Claire is having the perfect sixteenth birthday. Her pool party is a big success, and gorgeous Matthew keeps chatting and flirting with her as if she's the only girl there. But that night, she discovers something that takes away all sense of normalcy: she's a werewolf.
As Claire is initiated into the pack of female werewolves, she must deal not only with her changing identity, but also with a rogue werewolf who is putting everyone she knows in danger. Claire's new life threatens her blossoming romance with Matthew, whose father is leading the werewolf hunt. Now burdened with a dark secret and pushing the boundaries of forbidden love, Claire is struggling to feel comfortable in either skin. With her lupine loyalty at odds with her human heart, she will make a choice that will change her forever?." (From GoodReads.com)
I personally really enjoyed Clair de Lune. I found the new rules that were created for werewolves in this novel a refreshing change from what we've been seeing in other books. First off, werewolves can only be female. Second, you're born a werewolf, no biting involved. Also, humans know that werewolves exist. That was probably the best part for me. I always hated that people didn't know about all the paranormal surrounding them in other books and it was a breath of fresh air to have the human community know about the wolves existence. (Now I'm just waiting on the book where not only do humans know about them, but they also get along with them!)
The plot was pretty good as far as plots go. There were a couple different things going on. There was the relationship with Claire and Matthew, Claire coming into her wolfness, the rouge wolf, and the humans that were hunting the werewolves. I'm a romantic so of course my favorite part was Claire and Matthew! *sigh* Their relationship was pretty typical though. I won't go into detail so as not to ruin the book but I think you all know how they end up! I really enjoyed the part about how the humans hunted the werewolves because there had been killings in the area. They all blindly followed one man just because of a fear they had of the wolves. This was pretty cool because in most books it's just the wolves hiding from the humans so they don't know they exist. In Claire de Lune however, the humans knew they existed and the wolves had to hid for their own safety.
Character wise it wasn't that great. I found Claire to be kind of whinny for my taste. But then again I would probably be ten times worse if that happened to me. Claire's mother was an interesting yet slightly frustrating character. She was secretive and seemed to disappear at the most inconvenient times. Zahlia, one of the wolves in Claire's pack, she was mysterious, you never seemed to know what was going on with her and for awhile you weren't quite sure where her allegiance lied, again I won't go into details because I don't want to spoil anything. The last character I found interesting was Claire's nanny like type person, Lisbeth, I personally was thinking that she was something more than she let on the whole time, but I'm not gonna tell you if I was right or not! Matthew, Claire's beau, I wish he wasn't so stereotypical, I doubt I even have to explain this one. Just once I would like to see the guy freak out and leave (but that's just me!)(actually, this did happen in Blood and Chocolate, which I find very similar to this book, definitely read it if you liked this, but in B&C she ends up with someone else so it's okay). By the end of the book I wasn't really bonded to any of the characters. None of them had striking personalities and I wasn't sad to see the book end like I normally am. I wasn't left with the feeling of wanting more.
Over all, the book proved itself to break away from a lot of the werewolf stereotypes although as long as a book is about werewolves it never will fully do that. The plot was good and there was always something interesting going on but the characters were lacking.
