Brianna Reviews - Ravaged by David Wellington

Published:  2010

Publisher: Piatkus Books

Format: Paperback

Synopsis: The days grow colder.  The nights grow longer.  And every time the moon rises, the wolf inside her grows a little stronger.Cheyenne Clark—a woman whose hatred for werewolves has turned her into the very beast she most despises—prowls the Arctic Circle on the trail of an ancient secret, hunting for the one thing that could remove the lycanthropic curse and make her human again.    

Yet standing between Chey and her goal are a werewolf hunter armed with a diabolically brilliant weapon, a centuries-old werewolf with her own mysterious agenda…and Chey’s own complicated feelings for the man who doomed her to this existence but on whom her life now depends. 

Worse, with every hour that passes, the wolf inside Chey becomes more powerful.  It won’t be long before the woman disappears completely, and only the beast is left.  

Ravaged is the sequel to Cursed which I read sometime last year. It took me a while to work out which book did come next because when I originally googled the series, I came across 4 different titles: Cursed, Frostbite, Ravaged and Overwinter. Turns out Cursed was either originally titled Frostbite and Ravaged originally Overwinter. Or they are titled Frostbite & Overwinter in America and Cursed & Ravaged in the UK, so there is in fact only the two books Cursed/Frostbite and Ravaged/Overwinter.  

Cursed left off with Chey and Powell leaving Port Radium together. Ravaged picks up shortly after this. I found that the first half of this book dragged. The plot didn’t really seem to be moving and was just a lot of ‘Oh look here are Powell and Chey dancing through the wilderness’ – cute but not great story material. In hindsight the driving plot line for this book is the search for the ‘cure’ but this is not apparent at first. I mean, Powell mentions the cure but in the same sentence seems to dismiss it – after all he has been searching for it for the last hundred years.  The plot does pick up momentum eventually and it sticks around until the end, so maybe the book could have benefited from getting rid of the first 100 pages or so. For those who like Dzo he is back again in Ravaged and this time we learn a lot more about him than the vagarities that we learn in Cursed. We also discover a little more about Powell’s past and the time he spent in Europe.  We don’t however learn any more about Chey, Cursed clearly told us enough.

It’s been a while since I read Cursed but I think the eventual plot line and action of Ravaged might have been better. I know so far this review sound like a comparison of the two books, this is because I’m not entirely sure what I did think of Ravaged. I enjoyed reading it, but then I like reading so I enjoy most things I read. There might have been moments when I didn’t want to stop reading but I didn’t put the book down and think wow that was a good book it was more of a “meh, there’s a series finished”. I also was not satisfied by the ending, it was the kind of ending I don’t read much of these days so in that respect I liked it, but ultimately I found the end unsatisfying.