Stolen and Forgiven by Carrie Ann Ryan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stolen

The first rule of being Alpha of the Canine Pack is to protect their secrets from the humans at all cost. One look at the dying human at his doorstep and Holden Carter knows he will have to break it. The broken woman with no hope at survival is his mate. When he forces the change on her to save her life, he not only sets forth motions that could risk both their lives, but the lives of every shifter in the world.

Ariel Sands grew up in a post-Verona infection world and under the care of the very humans she thought had cured the disease. When they betray her in the worst ways imaginable, she finds herself not only mated to the Alpha of a the very species she’s been taught to fear, but the focal point of a traitor and path to destruction for everyone’s way of life. It will take more than trust and a mating bond for Ariel and Holden to not only survive their enemies, but the burn of their own temptations.

Forgiven

Soren Slater is a Beta wolf who understands that duty to his Pack comes before his own needs. At a young age he takes a position as a liaison between his Pack and the other species of shifters. He never expected his enticing flirtations with Cora Wilder, a Tiger Princess, would encourage her cat to consider him a potential mate. He’s forced to walk away, choosing a partner among the wolves to try and strengthen his Pack.

Cora has no intention of forgiving or forgetting Soren’s rejection. Not even when the Packs are forced to live together and she discovers Soren’s former mate has died. But then, she’s kidnapped by the SAU and she has no choice but to work with Soren to escape. Together they must put the past behind them if they’re to survive the human’s evil plot.

Stolen and Forgiven

A Twofer!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 🖤💙❤️💚
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Chemistry: 🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: 🙃🙁😀😋
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Solo Narration

The World: Earth 25 years after the Verona virus that nearly wiped out most of the human population. Shifters had come out of hiding to offer their blood as an antidote which brought the virus to an end. Shifters then ended up branded, collared and forced to live like animals in small compounds for each type of shifter (canine, ursine, and feline), they suffer from infighting and humans keep enacting new laws that threaten the shifters even more.

STOLEN

The Hero: Holden – Alpha of the river pack of canine shifters. His duty was to make sure his pack was never forgotten. They hated the collars, and the humans would kill them if they took off the collars. Since each of the shifter species were separated from the others, the wolves, bears, and cats are at odds with each other as well as the humans. His pack wants to fight back against the humans and have been building up their numbers but aren’t at that point yet. To get the freedom that his pack now has twenty years ago, Holden had begged, pleaded, was tortured, and agreed to take part in brutality monthly. None of the females in his pack called to his wolf, and he needed to find the one for him, so he had no chance for true happiness.

The heroine: Ariel – she thought for sure she was dead this time. She had spent months, maybe years at the edge of death as the butchers played with their toy. She had been at the mercy of doctors at an SAU lab, knowing from the first time they poked a needle in her arm against her will that her life was no longer her own. She grew up in an SAU orphanage after her parents succumbed to the virus. She once overheard one of the doctors saying they were trying to make her a shifter.

The Story: Holden smelled human blood while running in the forest. He shifted to human and found a body dumped near the fence. Someone had cut her up and dropped her over the high fence, breaking bones in the process. He had seen many horrors in his time alive, and this was by far the worst. This wasn’t the first time the SAU (Shifter Accommodation Unit) had dumped a body on shifter lands to try to blame the shifters for something they had done. Holden didn’t think he could do anything for her, but he knew that she was his mate. He knew he could bite and change her, but it was forbidden, because humans didn’t know that shifters could make other shifters. He knew doing this would risk everything he and his people had fought for, but he couldn’t do anything else.

I liked the story, and the world was unusual for shifter books, so I appreciated the originality of this world. It was intense—dystopian shifter societies, brutal government control, and deep-seated interspecies conflict. I can see why you appreciated the originality of the setting; it’s refreshing to see a unique twist on shifter lore rather than the usual tropes.

When I picked up this audiobook, I just read the first few lines of the blurb and it sounded good, plus I love the narrator, so I grabbed it and began to listen before figuring out that it wasn’t just one book, it was two novellas packaged together. I wish it was just one longer book, but either way I did enjoy the storylines.

The world building was terrific, though I wish the character development was a bit better, Holden was described well, and his background was full, though Ariel was not described well aside from how she was found. Given her traumatic past and the experimentations she endured, there’s a lot of potential for a layered, emotionally complex character arc. The book could have benefited from expanding her story more.

One thing I hate about stories like this, where the main characters are treated so bad by another group of people, I just want them so bad to find a way to change things, by either beating the bad organization or somehow making the world see what is really going on. Since in this case the world doesn’t know that it was the shifters that saved them from the virus. They have only heard propaganda from the SAU about the shifters as vicious animals that are a danger to them. The world doesn’t know that they are forced to wear collars and branded and kept like animals.



FORGIVEN

The Hero: Soren – he is a beta wolf and best friend of the Alpha Holden, and he has been the liaison between his pack and other shifter groups. He has had to sneak from his fenced in guarded territory to that of other groups of shifters, so they keep updated on what is going on and hopefully plan a way to break free of the tyranny someday.

The heroine: Cora – her father Jonah is the alpha of the golden pack of felines. He was a tiger shifter and was the meanest, baddest cat around and he adores his daughter. Cora was independent, though wants some freedom to do as she chooses. She had fallen for Soren in the past when he was a liaison and he had broken her heart when he chose to stay with his pack and mate another wolf. Though her cat had chosen him as a mate.

The Story: As a punishment for what the river pack did at the end of the first book, the SAU moved the feline golden pack into the small area that the pack occupied. The feline and wolf pack weren’t enemies, but they weren’t ever friends either. In the past when felines and canines have occupied the same territory, things hadn’t ended well. Jonah, as alpha knew about Cora’s fascination with Soren, and he knew all about duty, so he didn’t blame Soren for hurting his daughter. When they move into the river pack territory, he asks Cora to go with him to greet them and tells her about the fact that Soren’s mate died.

The one thing I really liked about these stories was that even though they are technically novellas, they two of them together are nearly 400 pages long (nearly 8 hours of audio), so there is so much world building and plenty of story so that they do not at all seem novella length. I probably wouldn’t have picked these two stories up if they were separated, because I like longer stories, though I am glad I did because they turned out to be great and I plan on listening to the next books in this series as well.

The shifter dynamics, political intrigue, and emotional tension between Soren and Cora make for a compelling story. I love how the world-building feels substantial despite the novella format—having enough depth to make the conflicts and relationships feel earned. It’s interesting that Cora’s cat chose Soren as her mate despite him being a wolf and devoted to his pack. That kind of built-in soulmate connection versus personal choice always creates great tension. And the forced cohabitation of the feline and wolf packs adds another layer—historical distrust mixed with necessity.

This book went in a direction I wasn’t expecting though. With the death of the SAU doctor in the first book, a new research scientist took his place and has plans of his own, to use an alpha to change a human and to figure out what made the change happen so he could create a virus to change hundreds of humans at once. Though I am not quite sure how he expected to control them. He decided that the best way to get an alpha to comply was to steal the daughter of the feline alpha, Jonas.

This audiobook was narrated from multiple perspectives, done in solo narration by Aiden Snow. I absolutely love Aiden’s voice, it is deep, but soft and I could listen to him all day. He is one of the few narrators that I don’t mind at all listening to as solo narration. He does a terrific job. He has a voice that could make reading a grocery list sound dramatic. His ability to carry multiple perspectives solo added a lot of depth to the experience.

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