Audio Book Review: Mave Fortune By Elizabeth Dear

Mave Fortune
(Blackstone Academy #1)
By Elizabeth Dear

Narrator: Stefanie Kay & Neill Thorne
Length: 13 hours and 17 minutes

When my family left our small, ultra-conservative pack back in Utah to join a giant pack in Northwest Louisiana, I thought I'd be able to coast through my last year of high school in semi-anonymity, then get the fuck away from wolf pack politics and just live my life for awhile. But the Moon decided to prolong my torture by placing my fated mate in front of my face on my first day at Blackstone Academy. He's the Alpha's son and king of a school crawling with shifters, and it turns out he doesn't care to be saddled with a Moon-chosen mate who he thinks is a nobody-omega wolf.

When he rejects me in front of every shifter in school, I vow to harden my heart, become impervious to the constant, deep hurt of the rejection, and figure out how to be the first wolf in known history to shake the taint of a rejected fated mate bond.

I'm also becoming closer to a new student—a smoking hot and intriguing human, who I can't manage to scare off even with the drama that surrounds me and the poisonous pack politics that I can't seem to escape. I can't even tell him what's really going on, but I think he's keeping secrets from me, too.

I'm Mave Fortune, and my mate threw me out like yesterday's garbage. But fuck that guy.

This is a new adult, M/F rejected mates standalone story. It is intended for the 18+ crowd and contains foul language, some mild violence, and sexual scenes. If you're a fan of upper YA/NA, wolf shifters, academy romances and the tropes associated with each, dive right in!

Available At:

| Amazon | Audible |

Check Out The Other Books In This Series:

(Linked to my review)

My Review:

So...Confession time! I was in quite the mood when I initially picked up this book. I had it in myself to DNF it after reading the prologue. I know, I know but I was in a really weird mood! I remember thinking it read juvenile and nothing else. Color me surprised when I saw this had an audio book. Since I was waiting on another book to release I picked it up and OMG I love this book. It's my new personality! 

For a first-time author, this was very well written! The plot was steady-paced and purposeful. There wasn't a dull moment in this story and I can certainly appreciate the level of dedication it must have taken to make this book what it is today.

I loved how positively the LGBTQ+ community was represented. The heroine's brother is gay and has a lot of relevant on-page time and isn't suffering/in distress every time we see him. He's a big help to Mave and the situation she's in. The next book features him as the main character and I'm very intrigued about how his whole ordeal is going to play out.

The heroine, Mave, was a bad*ss empowered woman. Her family was her biggest supporter and backbone. She always stood up for herself and her friends when in danger. I liked her very much. 

Mave's partner (whose name escapes me now...oops) was pretty awesome! He respected her, cared about her, AND listened to her. Color me surprised! On a more serious note, he was fantastic and saved the day in more ways than one. 

The werewolf society the author started fleshing out in this book was very toxic and believed a woman's place was beneath the boot of her jailor *ahem* mate. I'm very interested in seeing if that changes with the leadership change and if that's going to reverberate in the other packs in the future. It was very frustrating to listen to but it sure was entertaining. 

The "villain" of this whole story was so good at being bad! The way he was written had me legitimately angry. I stayed up past midnight on multiple days to get to a place in the story where I could relax enough to let it go. 

Details I'd like to nitpick:

- Why the author made the executive decision to actively include brand names and song/artist names in the novel? Considering how LGBTQ+ positive this book was I was VERY surprised when the author brought up a song that was playing in the background that featured none other than DaBaby. This was probably written long before his homophobia was rearing its ugly head but I can't help but cringe. This is why I prefer authors make up brand names and bands/songs for their novels. It won't date their novel so easily in the future. It'll prevent anything that happens to those things mentioned from being reflected on how I feel about the novel. This is just a personal grievance for me but can you tell that I can go on and on about it when given the chance? 😅

- Maybe this is more of a me-being-a-very-private-person thing but the way Mave and Ben shared stories of the hookups they had in explicit detail with each other was just plain weird. 

- The over the top slut-shaming was really, really, really annoying. All the air-headed characters doing it to the heroine were very cliche. This hit a very prominent nerve for me. The story could have done with much less if any at all of this particular trope.

My Rating: