Mercy, I'm Home

~Mercy Thompson: Homecoming~
Mercy Thompson
Prequel to Moon Called
By Patricia Briggs
Illustrated by Francis Tsai & Amelia Woo
Amazon ~ Powell's

Mercy Thompson doesn't go searching for trouble, but it usually finds her anyway. She is a coyote-shapeshifter who has been raised by werewolves most of her life, but now she wants out from under their oppressive rules. Out of work, out of friends, she's just about ready to give up and move back in with her mother...

...When she suddenly finds her self in the middle of a werewolf feud. And while one side holds to the strict rules she's tried to escape from, the other prefers a much looser, and more dangerous, code of conduct.

So now all she has to do is find a place to live, a steady job, and stay out of the way of the local fae, vampires, and two packs of territorial werewolves. Somehow, moving back home doesn't sound like such a bad plan...


I know this wasn't on my list of Upcoming Reads. Heck, it wasn't even on my TBR list! But I was that the bookstore Tuesday, waiting for an author event (Kelly Armstrong) to start, and decided I'd pick up her first book (Bitten) to see if I liked it. Of course, in honor of the event the bookstore had moved ALL of her books to a different location. And I didn't feel like asking where they were, since I wasn't actually interested in buying it...

So I was browsing the shelves and noticed this book...and figured, what the hey? I had half an hour. And, actually, that was all I needed.

I found this an interesting foray into Mercy's world. Having read the series, there's not much here that we don't already know, but it was fun to see personalities clash nonetheless. It's a fairly short story, with only 2 plots interweaving, so you read it mostly for the characters.

The artwork was very stylized, and though there's nudity (Mercy can't maintain clothing when she shifts) it's handled pretty well. I thought it was fine overall, though I would have liked to have seen more of the wolves. Seeing the characters (besides Mercy) for the first time is definitely nice, though most were much different than I had pictured them—Zee and Stefan especially.

I found the story-line a little hard to follow. It liked to jump to flashbacks or skip ahead in time, such that it would take me a few panels to figure out what had happened. I picked this book up a couple months ago and the sudden time-change threw me off enough that I put it down after the first section. Knowing it was coming, though, helped me get through it the second time.

Based on the content, I'd say this it's mostly for established fans of the series, rather than catching new-comers. Then again, if you have some time in your local bookstore, and you see a copy of this on the shelves, you might just take the time and read it. ...Since that's what I did.

Approximate Reading Time: 30 Minutes