Book Review: Tantalize

I had a lot of travel time while on vacation so I actually read two books.  The first was City of Bones that I reviewed earlier and this one : Tantalize by Cynthia Leithich Smith.

I just discovered that this is a series, actually.  This is the story of a not so typical high school girl named Quincie.  Her parents are dead and she is left to run the family restaurant with her sometimes flighty uncle.  Enter a new chef (the old chef being murdered horribly with her there in the building), and her uncles awful new girlfriend and things head south faster then a redneck BBQ.  And let’s not forget her half-breed werewolf boyfriend.

Actually Kieren (the boyfriend) is part of the problem I have with the book.  He is OK, maybe a little flat, but her obsession with him keeps the story from really developing in my opinion.  Everything is about her and who she is more attracted to. I get it, she is a teenager, she has hormone issues, but I just felt it was too much about her looking for validation through the men in her life.

That makes me sound a bit bats. Maybe I am not expressing it right.  Quincie could be more than just someone’s girlfriend, but at the root of her character, that is what she wants.

Now that I know there are more, I will give it another shot. Maybe she grows up a bit more between books.

~Heather