Animal Attraction by Alexa & Patrick Silver

TITLE: Animal Attraction
AUTHOR: Alexa & Patrick Silver
PUBLISHER: Ellora’s Cave
LENGTH: Short story (roughly 13k)
GENRE: Paranormal ménage erotic romance
COST: $2.99

A terrible snowstorm has stranded hundreds of people at O’Hare Airport on Valentine’s Day, including a trio of shapeshifters. Wes and Tabitha Downes were on their way to a romantic cruise, designed to bring them back together as a couple, while shifter president, Brand Hove, is forced to cancel business plans. With human pheromones at their highest, they have to seek shelter or risk their shifter selves being revealed. Throwing the three of them together, however, leads to an eruption of sexual release and the discovery of soulmates.

I believe in soulmates. I do. I’ve been sucked into romances more than once where such terminology was used and I 100% believed it. I don’t think it’s a common thing, but that doesn’t stop me from believing it’s possible. So when I see stories start tossing these terms around, I keep my fingers crossed. When it’s done well, it’s gut-wrenching. Unfortunately, when it’s not, it ends up leaving me just a little bit sad about a missed opportunity.

This story falls into the latter category for me. The sex is reasonably hot, with interactions between all three – the men together, each of the men with Tabitha, all three together – but any commitment to the emotional attachment that elevates graphic scenes to another level isn’t there. Tabitha and Wes are barely holding their marriage together at the top of the story. There is no talking, no discussion of feelings before things improve. There’s just this one night of wild sex with Brand. Their marital issues get dropped completely in favor of Tabitha’s confusion over her first time shifting, and that’s where the story starts to derail.

There is a lot of shifter mythology in this story. There’s an international council, there’s special accommodations made for shifters, there’s expectations and guides and soulmate stuff that gets introduced fairly willy-nilly. Tabitha was raised unaware of her abilities, but there is no explanation why – all of a sudden – she is suddenly shifting. Maybe it was having contact with Brand, someone who embraces his shifter self. Except her husband is a shifter, as well. So what makes this night so special? I honestly don’t know. All I know is that with the introduction of all these changes, these three start talking about deeper feelings and bonds and finding the other parts of their souls. How did this couple on the brink of splitting up get this kind of turnaround? Because Brand is something special? There are hints that he is – at one point, he considers, He, more than any other shifter, was affected by human pheromones. – but what makes him so different is never made clear. That means I have nothing tangible to base any of this on. I just have all their thoughts, and then Brand’s out of the blue phone call to his spirit father – who, honest to God, I thought was like a Native American spiritual guide until he called the man on the phone – which “confirms” what Brand suspected. That he’d found his soulmates.

I’m left in the end not believing the romance I’ve just read. All of Wes and Tabitha’s problems are supposedly solved by this one night of passion. Even in a shifter world bigger than the story has room for, soulmates ought to be more than a shorthand to circumvent logical character progression.

Readability	6/10 – Choppy dissemination of detail and uneven prose made it difficult to read without wanting to jump around
Menage	6/10 – The sex is hot, and the fight for dominance believable, but it does little to compensate for shallow characterization
Characterization	4/10 – Shifter mythology is used as a shorthand for a character arc.
Entertainment value	4/10 – It’s difficult to enjoy the sex scenes – as hot as they might be – when the pacing is so uneven and I don’t have a good grip on the characters.
World building	5/10 – It felt like the bulk of the mythology got thrown out there after the characters have supposedly already connected. And even then, there were too many questions left hanging to be clear.
TOTAL:	25/50