REVIEW : Mysterious Boyfriend – Moonrise Academy Book #2- Wendy Rathbone

Review by Ulyssses Dietz

Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team

I enjoyed this even more than the first book in the Moonrise Academy series (The Headmaster). Rathbone brings us back into the universe of shifters as the dominant culture—alphas and omegas being the key players. Still, nothing about betas, leaving me wondering where in this genre of literature I might find some to learn about…

The centerpiece of this story is Calen Deets, a professor at Moonrise Academy. He’s in his early thirties and is the best friend of Julian, the interim headmaster—thus placing the timeline for this story as overlapping that of the first book.

Calen’s life is turned on its head at an academy trustee’s Christmas party. While enjoying a glimpse of a glamorous world he’s not part of, Calen is swept off his feet by a beautifully-dressed young alpha named Vash. In a very Cinderella-like way, Vash is suddenly called away, leaving Calen puzzled, captivated, and quite drunk.

The core plot device in this book is an arcane bit of wolf-shifter politics adhered to only by the oldest and richest of the local packs. Vash Landersham’s life is illuminated for the reader, as is his strange relationship to Corvaiz Arucali. This entire, crucial backstory is unknown to the smitten Calen, and becomes the key to the play of the narrative.

What Rathbone manages to bring to this tale of shifter love and tradition, beyond the notion of fated mates, is a very uncomfortable archaic notion of involuntary indenture linked to family honor. Apparently largely forgotten in the larger shifter world, this becomes the hurdle Calen will have to surmount.

Shifter romance, like any romantic genre, has its own tropes, and Rathbone makes good use of those, while offering her readers quirky twists on the larger lore that build up the emotional power of the story and make this universe her own.

That said, I would note that it seems to me a world so patently different from our own (i.e. there is no concept of “female,” which has pretty broad implications for the entire world in which this story takes place); such a world should be free of cultural references that distract. Mentions of Santa Claus, the Rothschild family, and baked Alaska all threw me a little. These specific choices were not critical. Because they seem to be tightly linked to my real world, they might not be helpful in a world meant to take us elsewhere.

Rathbone posits a hierarchy within the shifter world, and alludes to a not-too-distant past in which omegas were treated as “less than” in a way that resonates with Vash’s peculiar situation. This makes me curious about a larger view of the world these characters inhabit. Is this place in which the Moonrise Academy exists a country, or a province in a country? If there is Old Pack Law, then how did that evolve into what the denizens of the Academy seem to take the normal way things are done now? The author’s world-building is provocative, and seems to suggest many avenues of exploration in future series or additions to this series.

I have Moonrise Academy 3 (The Heir’s Redemption) on my Kindle already. Let’s see where this takes me.