I emerge from my three day Experience of binging this book blinking and bewildered, with no idea how to structure a coherent review. Luckily for me I was writing myself delighted notes as I read so I'm just going to stick them into a list and expand on them which we will go through now:

1. Our heroine wakes up with amnesia which is an excellent trope and it does give the author a lot of leeway because obviously not many people can definitively point and say that this is or is not how amnesia works. Anyway in this one the heroine takes one look at the hero and immediately thinks "wow, he could hurt me" and zooms to point "hey i like the thought of that" and then leaps to "am i some kind of adrenaline junkie or masochist?" which was so funny to me but also I truly do believe that if I ever woke up with amnesia and saw a stacked guy my thought process would be exactly the same

2. Probably my favourite line from the book: "The guy who could be the alpha male poster child was giving her respect by not tossing her over a shoulder and running? Damn, if she didn’t appreciate him for it." Yes, I too actively respect all stacked guys who don't toss me over their shoulders and trundle off into the sunset. My estimation of the male population has gone up tremendously

3. In this universe God, as in the Abrahamic God, is canonically real and he sends guardian angels to actively help you out if you pray hard enough. I get that supernatural stories basically all use the premise of magical populations have been living alongside but hidden from the human world and you are supposed to understand as just, our world but with werewolves, but somehow the twist that God is Real really threw me. You're telling me that God is real and has a flock of angels he delegates to help his prayees and this has had no theological repercussions on the way we see the world? Does God only like sexy werewolves? Actually that would be valid of him I guess

4. Late in book they try to justify this by assuring our hero that he's the only one who receives this help which sounds fake and they also try to explain away the God thing by having the hero ask an angel "so who is this God actually?" and the angel copping out by naming a bunch of deities God might also be and then saying "anyway I'm too tired for a philosophical discussion". BOO Zadkiel give me your treatise on the nature of divinity and tell me the why your abrahamic god is sometimes called odin but the greek gods are their own thing and how does the famously solitary abrahamic god deal with power sharing with the greek pantheon? Zadkiel!

5. The werewolves of this book all spend...a whole lot of time prevaricating on the nature of lycanthropy and telling us loudly and at increasing length that "were" "wolves" are a silly human invention, they are "lycanthropes" and they do NOT turn into wolves that is simply NOT a thing and moreover there are NO mythical creatures out there that turn into animals. Which is all maybe fine if a little overzealous for your run of the mill romance novel but shifter romance has skyrocketed in popularity in the last few years and that context made this absolutely hilarious to me. I was weeping with laughter when the hero went and sweepingly said NO magical creatures are out there who turn into animals. In this house shifter porn is NOT allowed

6. My friend Eva who I live messaged my reading experience to wisely asked what makes these guys lycanthropes anyway then if they're not werewolves and I had to go uhhhh they're Extra Durable? They are very scary looking and need to wear a glamour over themselves when out in public otherwise will scare humans to death? They get madly horny during the full moon? And Eva said lol I like the implication that wolves' mating habits revolve around the moon which is another devastating point I had no answer for

7. It seems clear that this ought to be an Omegaverse book given the werewolves are not actually wolves and the full moon is basically ruts and heats but this book is either too cowardly to give me that or doesn't want to be sued by a copyright villain, which is still cowardly just in a different way. They even talk about bonding in heavily Omegaverse coded terms and apparently our heroine can only get pregnant in a heat -- like, it is all there. The only thing that's not there is knotting, which was tragic to me but the series still has time to slide it in there pun very much intended

8. About two hundred pages in the hero's last name got dropped and I went, Oh boy I literally did not know Roman's last name until now. I got this in ebook form so I could do a ctrl F and I can confirm this was the one and only instance his last name was mentioned. I mean it's on the summary so if I'd read that more industriously I maybe wouldn't have been taken so off guard but it was still pretty funny to me that we get one Lanzo uttered and nothing else.

9. Towards the end of the book we start getting thrown exposition by the bucketful so the world is expanding rapidly, the predeceased are popping up everywhere, there are secret societies and whatnot, I feel like that's all pretty par for the course when the book is setting up a series but one moment of this worldbuilding which did stand out was the heroine discovering she might have been amnesiaed because she maybe has command triggers in her brain that force her to do things and she goes "Like The Manchurian Candidate or The Winter Soldier?" and someone else goes "Yes, like that" which made me laugh again. Yes Nova it is exactly like that. Don't lampshade it Nova you'll make it weird

10. The drinking game for this book should be A. every time the worldbuilding makes you laugh B. every time Roman tries to get rid of Nova or promises himself that he will never see her again after this and C. every time our very stacked alpha man hero is actually a very respectful softboy but if you really want to go to hospital for alcohol poisoning drink every time Nova is Not Like Other Werewolf Girls, bearing in mind that other werewolf girls are confined to nunneries and apparently spend most of their time scheming over how to marry the right guy. I think that one will have you drinking pretty much any time she's on the page

Those are all my notes, I think it should be clear now that I don't think this is a "good" book but I do think it is very zany and funny and I had heaps of fun with it. Many, many thanks to Entangled Publishing for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review

I'm an absolute fan of Zoe's Keeper's of the Veil series, which is a fantastic witch series that everyone should check out. But here we have Bad Moon Rising, which is the first interconnected standalone in The Crown's Wolves series.

The first half of the book starts off so strong and I couldn't put it down, just so hungry for more! And with Nova having Amnesia, she has put the pieces together of what happened to her. I loved that there's little truth drops as the story goes along and we start discovering more of her skills. She's a strong heroine that can absolutely hold her one, definitely a favorite when it comes to paranormal romances.

There's definitely a lot of side characters that are introduced, which I'm pretty interested what's to come with their stories. But it almost felt like too much all at once.

I was hoping for a bit more on the romance front and just seeing what was going to come of Nova and Roman. I know there's plenty that will be revealed as we get through this series and I'm definitely looking forward to that.

3.5/5

I good start to a new series

This is the first book in a new series, and there is a lot of world building within it. You meet a lot of characters and at times it jumps a lot and you have to really pay attention to try and understand what is going on. That being said it's a good read. I didn't fall in love with any of the characters, but I really want to know more about Nova along with Roman and all of his brothers. You can tell this is going to be a long book series with lot of twist and turns, and a lot of moving parts from all the different characters. I like the angel parts and hope through out the series we learn more, really about all the different kind of species that are in play throughout the story.