Unleashed (review)

A podunk town in the middle of the Ozark mountains is not where Katelyn McBride thought she'd be spending her senior year, especially when it seemed as though she was near to reaching her goal of becoming a dancer in L.A. After her mother was killed during the latest California earthquake, however, Katelyn is forced to move in with her last remaining relative, her grandfather, in Wolf Springs, Arkansas, a town that is as isolated as it is strange. The friends she makes there—handsome Trick, the former queen bee Cordelia, and her mysteriously seductive cousin, Justin—all seem to have some pretty serious secrets; when Katelyn is attacked by a wolf—and eventually turns into some sort of monster herself—she begin to understand the nature of the town and the lupine alliances currently working within it. The plot certainly has a fair amount of promise, particularly in the political maneuvering between and among the wolf packs; Cordelia's story is especially compelling as it pits her against her sisters in a battle for her alpha-male father's love and sanity (the King Lear echo underscored by her older sister Regan). Indeed, Cordelia would make a far more intriguing protagonist than the rather vanilla Katelyn, who merely joins the ever-growing list of displaced YA girls who move to a small town, inexplicably attract the attentions of several bad boys, and find themselves in a whole mess of supernatural chaos only to be rather unimpressively rescued time and time again by said bad boys. Still, it's a formula that works for a reason, and between the wolf mythology and the potential romances, Twilight fans will find enough here to latch onto.