Breaking Badger by Shelly Laurenston

Breaking Badger by Shelly Laurenston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So much fun. So, so much. I've been waiting for this book for months, and when I finally got it, I waited for a day on which I could read with no interruptions, and devoured the entire thing in one sitting.

It's comfort reading, that's for sure. Perhaps it sounds weird to categorise as "comfort" a book in which characters are disembowelled in a particularly gruesome fashion, siblings are constantly beating up on each other, there is ultra-violent sports and lots of screaming - oh my god the screaming! - but there it is. What can I say? I hate crassness in general, but in the case of this particular series, the way it's written just - works. Humour, sarcasm, violence, making one's own family, women kicking butt - this series has it all (in spades).

I've been wanting to read more about Mads and the basketball team for a while now - they were suitably nutso in the earlier Honey Badger instalments. Mads also has the worst family ever - which we knew from the first Honey Badger book. But what I love about this series - and the connected ones like Pride - is that the story is never simply about one couple. These are ensemble casts for a reason - the main characters have to have their families (blood or otherwise - and some blood families can be nightmares at best) to riff off. So it definitely helps to have read the preceding books.

The MacKilligan sisters march to the beat of their own drum, and unfortunately for the Malone brothers, that drum's come to their door. The Malones can be complete twits - certainly, the utter absurdity of how they burned the bridges with the very women who could help them and then tried clumsily to fix the situation is a case in point.

And, with that slow spreading smile, she said, “One day . . . your baby sister is going to come to me and ask me a question about men and dating”—she leaned away from her friends and toward the brothers—“and I’m going to tell her every. f***ing. thing.”

Which brings me to the snark. And the action. As I've said in other reviews, I'm an action junkie. Well-written action jumps off the page and into my head as though I were watching a movie. These might not be the battles she writes as GA Aiken, but Laurenston has a deft hand with action sequences and they are by turns gory, bloody, violent and thrilling.

To apex predators, badgers were nothing more than an add-on to their value meal. To honey badgers, however . . . their kind were apex predators—and damn proud of it.

The series has moved far beyond the romance and almost-every-chapter sex of the earlier instalments, and honestly, it works. One sex scene - and a pretty hot one at that - shows up somewhere in the final third of the book, and what I liked about it is that it wasn't part of some long, flirty, slow-burn romance. Mads and Finn are not those kinds of people. In fact, it took their family and friends (even the arrogant lunkhead Keane) to point out to them that they even liked each other. No soulful stares or hitching breath or romantic encounters. Their first date was all about the food, and even while they were packing it away, that scene came with huge but quiet emotion as we met more people who were more important in Mads' life than her actual blood family.

The rest of the book was taken up by intrigue, action, inter-clan shifter politics, and basketball team madness. The running joke about the house that Mads buys and that Nelle decorates in 24 hours with, well, EVERYTHING that Mads likes is freaking hilarious. Especially the condoms.

That was when they all bolted, trying to make it to freedom.
But Mads just wasn’t fast enough. Max grabbed the back of her T-shirt and held her.
Mads held her arms out toward her teammates. Tock began to come back toward her but Streep caught her arm and yanked her toward the front of the house.
“Forget her! Just run!”
Treacherous bitches!

Looking forward to the next few in the series - there were certainly sparks between the remaining Malone brothers and a couple of the basketball team members. I want to read more about Tonks and Streep, for one, especially after the utterly hysterical scene in the plane in which everyone refused to use the words "friends" or "love", just to get up Streep's nose. I want to read more about Shay the dog-loving tiger who is mocked for treating his pets so well because he's a predator. I'd like to smack young Nat upside the head and I hope the MacKilligan sisters manage to overcome the years of being babied and spoiled because she's going to need it. There will certainly need to be a few more to tease out the mystery the Malone brothers have been seeking - of who killed their father.

And with Kyle reappearing in the same book as Nat, and keeping in mind that several of the other young shifters are likely to be coming of age in books to come, there's certainly fodder for many more years of hilarity. One can but hope.

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