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Unleashed by Kristopher Reisz
The Blurb On The Back:
What lies beneath?
Everybody knows Daniel Morning is a star. He always has been. What they don’t know is how restless he feels, how he hates always living up to other people’s expectations. The urge to break free is beginning to gnaw at his insides.
Then Daniel meets Misty. She’s smoky and tender, and she lives by her own rules. She lets him into her pack of outcasts, and in on their little secret: They have learned to shapeshift and have been prowling the night as wolves.
Daniel falls hard for this intoxicating life of raw abandon, and he falls hard for Misty. The freedom to follow his most basic instincts is like nothing he’s ever felt. But Daniel is about to find out that such freedom comes at a price ...
17 year old Daniel Morning is a star pupil at his high school in Birmingham, Alabama – having been on the basketball team, his friends are jocks, his girlfriend is one of the most popular people in school and he was recently accepted to Cornell, an Ivy League college. But Daniel knows that he’s a fraud – his college acceptance having been won by a lie forced on him by his parents who were desperate for him to succeed.
Weighed down by his secret, Daniel becomes restless with his life, dissatisfied with his relationship with his friends. He becomes aware of Misty, an outsider in his school who hangs out with a group of similar misfits who have no future and live by their own rules. Suspicious of Daniel’s motives, Misty gradually lets him into her life and into a secret – she and her friends have discovered a way to shapeshift themselves into wolf form and spend their nights prowling the city, tagging the buildings to mark their territory.
Daniel finds freedom as a wolf and in his growing relationship with Misty. But the more he comes to love his new life, the more he has to use as his secrets threaten to spill out and old friends and new threaten to turn on him.
Kristopher Reisz’s YA novel successfully combines urban fantasy with genuine teenage concerns to produce a moving and thoughtful read.
Daniel is all too believable - used to fulfilling everyone’s expectations, the doubts about his academic abilities shake him enough to accept his parents’ solution and his subsequent self-disgust shakes him again. Reisz shows Daniel’s growing doubts and restlessness and why that tempts him to turn his back on his life.
Equally well portrayed is Misty – born into poorer circumstances, she was abandoned by her father who now has a new family of his own and though she acts tough, there’s a tenderness to her. Being a wolf gives her the means to escape her troubles, just as it does Daniel and that shared experience binds them closer.
The use of mushrooms and chanting to shapeshift feeds into the freedom it gives them and Reisz doesn’t moralise about it. He also uses Birmingham and its economic decline to good effect, with the on-going economic crisis constantly in the background, influencing characters’ decisions.
This is one of the best YA urban fantasies I’ve read all year. Check it out.
The Verdict:
One of the best YA urban fantasies I’ve read this year, I really believed this story of a teenage boy who wants to escape a wrong decision and who finds the freedom he craves with a group of shapeshifting misfits. This is a well written, clever and genuine book that deserves to be read widely.
Everybody knows Daniel Morning is a star. He always has been. What they don’t know is how restless he feels, how he hates always living up to other people’s expectations. The urge to break free is beginning to gnaw at his insides.
Then Daniel meets Misty. She’s smoky and tender, and she lives by her own rules. She lets him into her pack of outcasts, and in on their little secret: They have learned to shapeshift and have been prowling the night as wolves.
Daniel falls hard for this intoxicating life of raw abandon, and he falls hard for Misty. The freedom to follow his most basic instincts is like nothing he’s ever felt. But Daniel is about to find out that such freedom comes at a price ...
17 year old Daniel Morning is a star pupil at his high school in Birmingham, Alabama – having been on the basketball team, his friends are jocks, his girlfriend is one of the most popular people in school and he was recently accepted to Cornell, an Ivy League college. But Daniel knows that he’s a fraud – his college acceptance having been won by a lie forced on him by his parents who were desperate for him to succeed.
Weighed down by his secret, Daniel becomes restless with his life, dissatisfied with his relationship with his friends. He becomes aware of Misty, an outsider in his school who hangs out with a group of similar misfits who have no future and live by their own rules. Suspicious of Daniel’s motives, Misty gradually lets him into her life and into a secret – she and her friends have discovered a way to shapeshift themselves into wolf form and spend their nights prowling the city, tagging the buildings to mark their territory.
Daniel finds freedom as a wolf and in his growing relationship with Misty. But the more he comes to love his new life, the more he has to use as his secrets threaten to spill out and old friends and new threaten to turn on him.
Kristopher Reisz’s YA novel successfully combines urban fantasy with genuine teenage concerns to produce a moving and thoughtful read.
Daniel is all too believable - used to fulfilling everyone’s expectations, the doubts about his academic abilities shake him enough to accept his parents’ solution and his subsequent self-disgust shakes him again. Reisz shows Daniel’s growing doubts and restlessness and why that tempts him to turn his back on his life.
Equally well portrayed is Misty – born into poorer circumstances, she was abandoned by her father who now has a new family of his own and though she acts tough, there’s a tenderness to her. Being a wolf gives her the means to escape her troubles, just as it does Daniel and that shared experience binds them closer.
The use of mushrooms and chanting to shapeshift feeds into the freedom it gives them and Reisz doesn’t moralise about it. He also uses Birmingham and its economic decline to good effect, with the on-going economic crisis constantly in the background, influencing characters’ decisions.
This is one of the best YA urban fantasies I’ve read all year. Check it out.
The Verdict:
One of the best YA urban fantasies I’ve read this year, I really believed this story of a teenage boy who wants to escape a wrong decision and who finds the freedom he craves with a group of shapeshifting misfits. This is a well written, clever and genuine book that deserves to be read widely.