When I leave reviews on book selling sites, which is extremely rare, I put no spoilers into my review. I refuse. My saying I liked it and why should be enough. I'm not going to retell the story I just read.
I finished reading Wolf Rain at 11 PM March 5th. I would have finished much earlier, but... life.
So... Spoiler Alert. Reading any further will reveal certain elements of the book not on the jacket. You have been warned. Any whining about it later will leave you open to scorn, ill-regard, and mockery.
First off, as with any Nalini Singh book, I was sucked right into the adventure. We have been given glimpses of the hero, Alexei, before and we know he's considered the "pretty wolf" by his pack and he appears to accept it in good humor.
Now, in the Psy-Changeling books, we've been focused elsewhere in the last few years, no longer laser sighted on the Leopard and Wolf packs of Northern California. We've seen them in small slices, but they were never a huge part of the Trinity books, just support.
In that time Alexei has lost his brother, who had gone rogue and killed his own mate, forcing Hawke to put him down because Alexei would not have come back from having to put down his own brother.
The books opens to a ton of narrative from Alexei's POV as exposition to catch us up and it does. No matter how many of these books you've read, there is time in between, and a long time since we've heard from SnowDancer, we need the reminder. I appreciated it. It got my mind away from the Russian Bears and the Water Creatures. However, while we're there, if anyone is wondering what to get me for my birthday Friday, a Russian Bear would be great. I'd love it.
So we open to Alexei going to an area the rest of the Pack avoids like the plague. It holds significance for the Pack as it's where Hawke had the heavy mantle of Alpha laid on his shoulders at too young an age. He's swamped by emotions that he immediately recognizes are not his own. Someone is mourning and it's awful and it's strong.
He follows it and is confused when it seems he's standing right on top of it, but there is nothing but dirt and rocks. What's a wolf supposed to do? He digs. He finds a bunker, he finds an empath mourning the death of her elderly cat. He realizes she's been held prisoner and she's one thing no one sees in Es, ever, she's enraged.
Memory, the heroin of the tale has been held prisoner by a psychopath for fifteen years and she's held on to her anger over the death of her mother and her captivity as tightly as she did her cat.
Alexei gets her out of there, afraid the teleport capable Telekenetic (Tk) will return and try to take her back. He's held her for fifteen years and no one would expect him to just shrug off her being freed. The thing is, they don't know why.
Alexei takers her to a power station to get her dry and warm and wait for reinforcement to come get them off the mountain. He knows he has to get her to the E compound on DarkRiver land, so that she can be properly trained. He's intrigued because she's completely unshielded and the emotions she's broadcasting are not the rainbows and unicorns that Es usually send out to the world.
He gets her to the compound, and even though he's very attracted to her, he's decided that by taking a mate, he will go rogue just like his grandfather, just like his father, just like his brother. So, he takes the avoidance tack, however he keeps leaving her food gifts. We all know what that means with the Wolves.
Memory doesn't know what the food signifies so she gives the gifts away. Alexei won't come see her, won't speak to her, but he keeps leaving these gifts and she doesn't have the social experience to recognize the gifts for what they are. Plus, even though she's spent years watching documentaries and entertainment, they've never explained things like this that most people in this universe just know. So Alexei, when he hears she's giving his gifts away, gives her a tart with her name on it. No Wolf, E or Arrow will take it. Because they know what she doesn't and gently try to lead her to the knowledge she needs. She refuses to throw the food gifts away and ends up eating them anyway, which satisfies Alexei's need to care for her.
Memory is a very rare category of E. She's not like the others and keeps telling people she's not an E. Es are warm, full of laughter and sunshine and she's just dark, enabling psychopaths to keep psychopathing. Sascha, Queen E, their only cardinal so far, assures her she is an E and takes her to meet Amara Aleine once Memory explains how she works.
This is a very important scene when they go to DarkRiver. They are met by Dorian in Leopard form (making up for lost time) and he leads them to his home where his mate, Ashaya waits with her twin sister, Amara who is pure psychopath. She only feels anything for her sister and even that is not healthy or appreciated.
Memory delves into Amara and finds a small spark of empathy. Amara is overwhelmed. She realizes she loves her sister. Both women are very overcome. Memory tells them the effects of her session will only last a few hours and it's not lasting, but Ashaya is so grateful to have her sister, as she should have been, that she washes Memory with that emotion and Memory begins to feel that perhaps she can be of some help to the Es.
Sascha works with her, along with the other Es on building the shields she needs so that she's not loosing her emotions to the rest of the world, as she had done when Alexei noticed her. Everyone tells her that Sascha is the best and to expect her brain to feel stomped into the ground after her lessons.
She uses her new, learned abilities to tease Alexei by swamping him with happy, fuzzy feelings whenever her aggravates her.
Let me just say here that the play between these two characters is better than between Valentin and Silver Mercant in Silver Silence. It's almost like Alexei feels like he's got to represent the American Wolves and show the Russian Bears how to play with your mate. I loved it. Absolutely loved it.
Ashaya, because of getting to see her sister as a real human being for a while, helps memory with her hair, which she's had such a hard time controlling. She learns how to order clothes she likes and Memory loves color. She blossoms under the care of the Es and the Arrows, befriending Yuri, who seeks her advice on asking a fellow Arrow out on a date.
Now, in this book there are two villains. The Tk who stole Memory and held her prisoner and another who very much thinks he's doing the right thing in eliminating the Es.
A scene which is key to the story is when the second villain tries to take over Arrow minds to kill the Es. The Es and the Arrows are a unit. The Arrows harm themselves rather than harm the Es. Memory is there and the villain flees, but not before Yuri, who shot himself in the head, lays on the ground and both Arrows and Es are harmed by the violence. She gets them back on their feet so that they can help the others who are also experiencing the psychic whiplash from the attack.
It's a harrowing scene and it shows us that Memory is not bad, like she thinks. This hurts her just like it does her fellow Es, but she sort of sucks in bad shit and cleanses the area, without even realizing she's doing it. Alexei notices, though. He has a hard time not watching the woman who is so intriguing to his Wolf.
The next best scene is in San Francisco and Alexei takes Memory to the New Year celebration that had been postponed so that a BlackSea cruise ship could come into port and the Shifters on it can enjoy the celebration. Alexei teaches Memory how to access her money and buy her own food, after she balks at him buying her food. She doesn't understand the concept of a date and just sees it as being indebted to him and him holding power over her.
The Darkness that was at the E Compound shows up at the New Year celebration as it tries to find minds to do harm to a group of Es, but Memory finds she can track the mind and Alexei is there to help her and Kaleb Krychek shows up to help.
The scare the Darkness away, but the worry remains that it will return and Memory figures out that whoever it is wants to get rid of the Es. Kaleb doesn't like that as it is his duty to keep the PsyNet healthy, which is nearly impossible and he's come to realize that it's falling apart faster than Es can honeycomb it together. He knows he needs more but he doesn't know more of what.
He comes to realize that any stability in the net has something to do with Silver's link to her Bear mate. He doesn't understand how or how to replicate that stability elsewhere. Almost all of the Psy who have mated with shifters had left the PsyNet to be sucked into pack Nets that allow them the feedback they need to stay alive.
Alexei, meanwhile, realizes that Memory feels pain because she's been denied touch. He gives her that touch and in doing so reveals that he cannot had a mate because he will go rogue. He can give her touch, love and sex, but he refuses to form the mate bond with her. The do, eventually have sex and it's great for both of them. The Intimate Skin Privileges satisfies them both.
Memory asks Alexei to take her back to the bunker where he'd found her. She rightly knows that she needs to own that space to begin cleansing her soul of the darkness brought by her captor.
She is recaptured there and Alexie goes nuts. He remembers what he was told about the mate bond and that he can use it to find her and he opens himself up to it and the moment it snaps into place, he knows he can find her. He grabs Judd and they head out.
Memory is not the easy mark she was before and her captor realizes that. She manages to escape her bonds and she begins a dark pavane to gain time for Alexei to get to her. With Judd's help, he gets into the warehouse and kills the man. Memory is not overwhelmed by the violence as other Es would be, but she's shattered by the dead security guard that her captor had killed to take control of the warehouse.
Memory is welcomed by SnowDancer. She expects to be shunned as she is with the Es because of her psychic scent after she works with Amara Aleine. The wolves just shrug it off. It's a temporary scent and will wash off. Then she gets to listen to hilarious stories of how other people in the Den have had horrible smells after work. It bolsters her confidence.
We finally discover who the Darkness that is trying to kill the Es is and I was surprised. It's someone we know and have met before. The surprise in this is that he feels awful for what he did to the Arrows and he tells Aden that he can help Yuri, who Aden has hesitated to pull the plug on, because he's not brain dead. However, the price is to have a session with Memory, who grudgingly agrees but only after Yuri awakens.
Here is where we learn that Psy twins can do something called Harmonizing. That is how Yuri is brought back with a mont's amnesia to go with finding a very concerned Arrow who was devastated by his loss.
Memory helps the Darkness, as she calls him and he gets a moment of clarity showing him how mad he's gotten.
It's at that point that Kaleb and Ivy Jane discover that there is some strength, some structure happening in the PsyNet and it centers around Memory. The Netminds want to meet with her. She meets with the NetMind and the DarkMind and finds that she can "heal" or clean the parts of the PsyNet that are crumbling faster than Kaleb and Ivy Jane can fix them. It's taxing on her, but she's overjoyed to find that her power can do good and eagerly volunteers to do what she can when she can. Both Kaleb and Ivy Jane see that the stability surrounding Memory in the PsyNet is the same as the one around Silver. They both posit that perhaps it is the connection they can see in the mate bonds both have with their shifters. Silver and Memory are the only Psy to have remained in the net.
And this is where the tale ends, with another mystery as to how to get more humans and shifters to bond with Psy to enter the PsyNet and make it healthy, like the net the Lost built when they left the PsyNet to avoid Silence.
Excellent book, highly recommend the read. If you're not a Nalini Singh fan, you should be.
I finished reading Wolf Rain at 11 PM March 5th. I would have finished much earlier, but... life.
So... Spoiler Alert. Reading any further will reveal certain elements of the book not on the jacket. You have been warned. Any whining about it later will leave you open to scorn, ill-regard, and mockery.
First off, as with any Nalini Singh book, I was sucked right into the adventure. We have been given glimpses of the hero, Alexei, before and we know he's considered the "pretty wolf" by his pack and he appears to accept it in good humor.
Now, in the Psy-Changeling books, we've been focused elsewhere in the last few years, no longer laser sighted on the Leopard and Wolf packs of Northern California. We've seen them in small slices, but they were never a huge part of the Trinity books, just support.
In that time Alexei has lost his brother, who had gone rogue and killed his own mate, forcing Hawke to put him down because Alexei would not have come back from having to put down his own brother.
The books opens to a ton of narrative from Alexei's POV as exposition to catch us up and it does. No matter how many of these books you've read, there is time in between, and a long time since we've heard from SnowDancer, we need the reminder. I appreciated it. It got my mind away from the Russian Bears and the Water Creatures. However, while we're there, if anyone is wondering what to get me for my birthday Friday, a Russian Bear would be great. I'd love it.
So we open to Alexei going to an area the rest of the Pack avoids like the plague. It holds significance for the Pack as it's where Hawke had the heavy mantle of Alpha laid on his shoulders at too young an age. He's swamped by emotions that he immediately recognizes are not his own. Someone is mourning and it's awful and it's strong.
He follows it and is confused when it seems he's standing right on top of it, but there is nothing but dirt and rocks. What's a wolf supposed to do? He digs. He finds a bunker, he finds an empath mourning the death of her elderly cat. He realizes she's been held prisoner and she's one thing no one sees in Es, ever, she's enraged.
Memory, the heroin of the tale has been held prisoner by a psychopath for fifteen years and she's held on to her anger over the death of her mother and her captivity as tightly as she did her cat.
Alexei gets her out of there, afraid the teleport capable Telekenetic (Tk) will return and try to take her back. He's held her for fifteen years and no one would expect him to just shrug off her being freed. The thing is, they don't know why.
Alexei takers her to a power station to get her dry and warm and wait for reinforcement to come get them off the mountain. He knows he has to get her to the E compound on DarkRiver land, so that she can be properly trained. He's intrigued because she's completely unshielded and the emotions she's broadcasting are not the rainbows and unicorns that Es usually send out to the world.
He gets her to the compound, and even though he's very attracted to her, he's decided that by taking a mate, he will go rogue just like his grandfather, just like his father, just like his brother. So, he takes the avoidance tack, however he keeps leaving her food gifts. We all know what that means with the Wolves.
Memory doesn't know what the food signifies so she gives the gifts away. Alexei won't come see her, won't speak to her, but he keeps leaving these gifts and she doesn't have the social experience to recognize the gifts for what they are. Plus, even though she's spent years watching documentaries and entertainment, they've never explained things like this that most people in this universe just know. So Alexei, when he hears she's giving his gifts away, gives her a tart with her name on it. No Wolf, E or Arrow will take it. Because they know what she doesn't and gently try to lead her to the knowledge she needs. She refuses to throw the food gifts away and ends up eating them anyway, which satisfies Alexei's need to care for her.
Memory is a very rare category of E. She's not like the others and keeps telling people she's not an E. Es are warm, full of laughter and sunshine and she's just dark, enabling psychopaths to keep psychopathing. Sascha, Queen E, their only cardinal so far, assures her she is an E and takes her to meet Amara Aleine once Memory explains how she works.
This is a very important scene when they go to DarkRiver. They are met by Dorian in Leopard form (making up for lost time) and he leads them to his home where his mate, Ashaya waits with her twin sister, Amara who is pure psychopath. She only feels anything for her sister and even that is not healthy or appreciated.
Memory delves into Amara and finds a small spark of empathy. Amara is overwhelmed. She realizes she loves her sister. Both women are very overcome. Memory tells them the effects of her session will only last a few hours and it's not lasting, but Ashaya is so grateful to have her sister, as she should have been, that she washes Memory with that emotion and Memory begins to feel that perhaps she can be of some help to the Es.
Sascha works with her, along with the other Es on building the shields she needs so that she's not loosing her emotions to the rest of the world, as she had done when Alexei noticed her. Everyone tells her that Sascha is the best and to expect her brain to feel stomped into the ground after her lessons.
She uses her new, learned abilities to tease Alexei by swamping him with happy, fuzzy feelings whenever her aggravates her.
Let me just say here that the play between these two characters is better than between Valentin and Silver Mercant in Silver Silence. It's almost like Alexei feels like he's got to represent the American Wolves and show the Russian Bears how to play with your mate. I loved it. Absolutely loved it.
Ashaya, because of getting to see her sister as a real human being for a while, helps memory with her hair, which she's had such a hard time controlling. She learns how to order clothes she likes and Memory loves color. She blossoms under the care of the Es and the Arrows, befriending Yuri, who seeks her advice on asking a fellow Arrow out on a date.
Now, in this book there are two villains. The Tk who stole Memory and held her prisoner and another who very much thinks he's doing the right thing in eliminating the Es.
A scene which is key to the story is when the second villain tries to take over Arrow minds to kill the Es. The Es and the Arrows are a unit. The Arrows harm themselves rather than harm the Es. Memory is there and the villain flees, but not before Yuri, who shot himself in the head, lays on the ground and both Arrows and Es are harmed by the violence. She gets them back on their feet so that they can help the others who are also experiencing the psychic whiplash from the attack.
It's a harrowing scene and it shows us that Memory is not bad, like she thinks. This hurts her just like it does her fellow Es, but she sort of sucks in bad shit and cleanses the area, without even realizing she's doing it. Alexei notices, though. He has a hard time not watching the woman who is so intriguing to his Wolf.
The next best scene is in San Francisco and Alexei takes Memory to the New Year celebration that had been postponed so that a BlackSea cruise ship could come into port and the Shifters on it can enjoy the celebration. Alexei teaches Memory how to access her money and buy her own food, after she balks at him buying her food. She doesn't understand the concept of a date and just sees it as being indebted to him and him holding power over her.
The Darkness that was at the E Compound shows up at the New Year celebration as it tries to find minds to do harm to a group of Es, but Memory finds she can track the mind and Alexei is there to help her and Kaleb Krychek shows up to help.
The scare the Darkness away, but the worry remains that it will return and Memory figures out that whoever it is wants to get rid of the Es. Kaleb doesn't like that as it is his duty to keep the PsyNet healthy, which is nearly impossible and he's come to realize that it's falling apart faster than Es can honeycomb it together. He knows he needs more but he doesn't know more of what.
He comes to realize that any stability in the net has something to do with Silver's link to her Bear mate. He doesn't understand how or how to replicate that stability elsewhere. Almost all of the Psy who have mated with shifters had left the PsyNet to be sucked into pack Nets that allow them the feedback they need to stay alive.
Alexei, meanwhile, realizes that Memory feels pain because she's been denied touch. He gives her that touch and in doing so reveals that he cannot had a mate because he will go rogue. He can give her touch, love and sex, but he refuses to form the mate bond with her. The do, eventually have sex and it's great for both of them. The Intimate Skin Privileges satisfies them both.
Memory asks Alexei to take her back to the bunker where he'd found her. She rightly knows that she needs to own that space to begin cleansing her soul of the darkness brought by her captor.
She is recaptured there and Alexie goes nuts. He remembers what he was told about the mate bond and that he can use it to find her and he opens himself up to it and the moment it snaps into place, he knows he can find her. He grabs Judd and they head out.
Memory is not the easy mark she was before and her captor realizes that. She manages to escape her bonds and she begins a dark pavane to gain time for Alexei to get to her. With Judd's help, he gets into the warehouse and kills the man. Memory is not overwhelmed by the violence as other Es would be, but she's shattered by the dead security guard that her captor had killed to take control of the warehouse.
Memory is welcomed by SnowDancer. She expects to be shunned as she is with the Es because of her psychic scent after she works with Amara Aleine. The wolves just shrug it off. It's a temporary scent and will wash off. Then she gets to listen to hilarious stories of how other people in the Den have had horrible smells after work. It bolsters her confidence.
We finally discover who the Darkness that is trying to kill the Es is and I was surprised. It's someone we know and have met before. The surprise in this is that he feels awful for what he did to the Arrows and he tells Aden that he can help Yuri, who Aden has hesitated to pull the plug on, because he's not brain dead. However, the price is to have a session with Memory, who grudgingly agrees but only after Yuri awakens.
Here is where we learn that Psy twins can do something called Harmonizing. That is how Yuri is brought back with a mont's amnesia to go with finding a very concerned Arrow who was devastated by his loss.
Memory helps the Darkness, as she calls him and he gets a moment of clarity showing him how mad he's gotten.
It's at that point that Kaleb and Ivy Jane discover that there is some strength, some structure happening in the PsyNet and it centers around Memory. The Netminds want to meet with her. She meets with the NetMind and the DarkMind and finds that she can "heal" or clean the parts of the PsyNet that are crumbling faster than Kaleb and Ivy Jane can fix them. It's taxing on her, but she's overjoyed to find that her power can do good and eagerly volunteers to do what she can when she can. Both Kaleb and Ivy Jane see that the stability surrounding Memory in the PsyNet is the same as the one around Silver. They both posit that perhaps it is the connection they can see in the mate bonds both have with their shifters. Silver and Memory are the only Psy to have remained in the net.
And this is where the tale ends, with another mystery as to how to get more humans and shifters to bond with Psy to enter the PsyNet and make it healthy, like the net the Lost built when they left the PsyNet to avoid Silence.
Excellent book, highly recommend the read. If you're not a Nalini Singh fan, you should be.
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