FERAL. DANGEROUS. FATED.

Alex was supposed to disappear into the human juvenile detention system.

Instead, she’s sent somewhere far worse.

Feral Academy.

Hidden deep in the Alaskan wilderness, the academy exists to contain the most dangerous supernatural males alive—the feral wolf shifters who’ve lost control.

One of them was rescued from the frozen slopes of Denali.
Now he’s the most unstable resident at the academy.

And the moment he sees Alex… he fixates.

Alex doesn’t know she’s supernatural.

She doesn’t understand why powerful wolves react to her scent.

They say a fated mate can calm the beast.

They’re wrong.

Because Alex doesn’t trigger just one bond.

She triggers several.

As rival wolves circle and dangerous bonds ignite, Alex begins to realize the academy wasn’t built to protect the world from monsters.

It was built to cage them.

And if the wolves lose control…

she might be the reason why.

As is predictable for this time of year in the UK, the weather doesn’t know whether it wants to be warm and sunny or gloomy and rainy. Which leaves me in the predicament of a never-ending air pressure migraine. I have so far managed it relatively well through hydration, food, and sleep, but today it is taking no prisoners, and my eyes don’t want to stay open.

I actually started reading a different book, When the Moon Hatched, and I got through one chapter before I got irritated by the unnecessary over-explanation of the world and the characters. I was immediately transported back to Tolkien and his ridiculously long staircase narrative. I just couldn’t gel with it. Which led me to pick a different book at random, and land on this one.

To be honest, I found the book’s narrative difficult to follow. The chapters with a different POV weren’t clearly outlined. And it almost felt like the book was the 2nd or 3rd in a series where the knowledge is already known.

I know I tend to write long paragraphs about the characters in my reviews because I focus more on character development and evolution. I can’t add much here, since I didn’t learn much. The characters weren’t 2D, but they still felt flat and lacked substance.

Alex is our shining female main character. She grew up in the foster system. Multiple stints with different families and stays in Juvie. She also has the unfortunate event on her file that she may or may not have murdered someone four years ago…She gets whisked away and relocated to a compound without so much as a word. Here she encounters strict juvie-style rules and quickly learns she is A) the only female in the compound and B) people here shift into wolves. The plot and the characters ‘claim’ to not know exactly what Alex is… she finds her mates in proximity, walking through common areas and the outside ‘grass’ space.

Ry is one of her mates. He is an unstable feral wolf who doesn’t speak, can’t communicate and is more feral wolf than man…The compound was basically built to contain him, and no one is doing anything to actually help him get better.

Gray is the last mate she meets, technically. Gray is a wolf in ‘Gold House’ and is 6 months away from reintegration with the wider human population. He fights the bond at first. But really, between Alex’s first meeting with him and him giving into the mate pull, it’s about four chapters… and nothing really develops between that time.

Leo is the first mate that Alex identifies. Actually, physical contact triggers his first shift into wolf. I wanted to like this character because, as the first mate, he had so many possibilities, but yet again, the character was flat and without substance. I learned nothing about the mates in this book. Nothing about their past, their likes or dislikes, their behaviour or personality. It sucked.

Sven, Stone, Cal, & Lumi and the ‘secondary characters’. Sven is Alex’s guard when she is out of her room. No-nonsense, quiet. Stone seems to stand watch when they have ‘time outside’ and also runs some kind of physical class that was mentioned once at the beginning of the book and then never mentioned again, and to my knowledge, no classes actually took place at all, at any point in the book.

Cal is like a school counsellor, and I could see that he was built to be bumbling and kind. Like a cross between Arthur Weasley and Remus Lupin, but, you guessed it, a flat character!

Lumi is like a therapist. She’s actually mated to Stone, Cal, and another unknown person. So she had the scope and ability to transform the narrative and help Alex through her events. But she didn’t. And she ended up just feeling like a forgotten character.