Book Review: A Mate for Thanksgiving

Title: A Mate for Thanksgiving

Author: Erin Havoc

Date: 2022

Quote: "There's nothing to say. Just feel."

Right. That's the fantasy in this book. Woman accidentally runs over wolf on snowy road, tries to save his life, discovers that he's a werewolf and she likes him as a man. Mainly because he's always avoided humans and lived mostly as a wolf with his litter mates, he's not yet found a mate. (Wolves are believed to be as monogamous as dogs are not.) So they mate, as wolves do, and now they're Partners for Life. Right? Well...this pathetic woman believes her hormonal feelings are "love," so what they're going to do when she comes off heat, who knows. But it's a fantasy.

This is the sort of "romance" that can fairly be called porn. The last two or three chapters contain little but body parts. There's no pretense to redeeming social value, no attempt to develop the characters as anything but sets of bodies--perfect, of course, despite the wolf-man's recent injuries. Some person, or couple, was trying very very hard to describe either what worked for the person the night before, or what the person is sure would work for the person if a certain other person would only try it. I tend to suspect that the authors of straight-into-bed "romances" are all men writing under female pseudonyms, but who knows, maybe some of them are just nineteen years old. Read it if that sort of thing works as a marital aid for you. Destroy it before the children come in. I'll admit I skimmed through the bedroom scenes, as women do when we're not trying to get into The Mood, but my guess would be that they don't answer the kind of questions that are in teenagers' minds accurately, either.

Just don't ever take this kind of fantasy seriously in real life, because error'n havoc are what that would be and what it would wreak. Ask your friends who've tried it.

I'm surprised, though perhaps I shouldn't be, that this is what Kindle has to offer in the way of Thanksgiving stories, compared with all the Christmas and Halloween stories. Come to that, I don't think I've ever seen a novel advertise that its characters fall in love on Veterans Day, either, or New Year's Day or the Day of the First Snow. Romance writers are leaving lots of potential markets unexploited.