Once in a Full Moon by Ellen Schreiber
Oh, if I've ever had a bookfail, this was definitely one. I don't know what I was expecting when I started reading Once in a Full Moon. I know Ellen Schreiber is not a good author due to my fangirling of her other series, Vampire Kisses, for reasons I do not care to explain here. It's a pretty bad series that gets to "so bad, it's good" levels sometimes. She has a Special Author Pass that lets her get away with a lot of stuff I don't like when other authors do it. I wouldn't have bought Once in a Full Moon if it didn't have her name on it. Got to support the author I love, right?
I had expectations of a decent, fluffy story that was like Vampire Kisses with werewolves instead of vampires. What I got was a book so bad not even her Special Author Pass could save it. I gave up on page 160 out of about 300, and I almost never leave books unfinished. It only happens when a book is catastrophically horrible, and I can count on one hand how many books I've left unfinished. How bad was it? Step under the cut to find out. (Note: I will mention her other series a few times because of their striking similarities and my feelings about what went wrong with Once in a Full Moon intertwine with how I feel about Vampire Kisses.)
This is its lovely cover, complete with striking eyes:
Celeste lives in a small town called Legend's Run that is famous for its werewolf stories. She's popular, has "good" friends and a hot boyfriend, and volunteers at the senior center. She would love for the Eastsiders (rich, popular kids like her) and the Westsiders (kids from the other, more rural side of town) to get along, but then a new kid named Brandon moves to town. She thinks he's cute, but she falls in love after he saves her from a pack of wolves. Yet she can't be with him! He's a Westsider! She's not allowed (even though she totally is)! There's stuff about werewolves being in the town and Brandon being one of them, but that paranormal element wasn't getting much coverage by the time I stopped reading.
This book's biggest problem was its tone. I am more accepting of certain events in novels if the narration makes me feel like they're just playing around and aren't really serious. That is how I tolerate it when Raven, main character of Vampire Kisses, breaks into her love interest's house a few times (which is not something I tolerate well in ficton, due to my own home-invasion-related trauma). In an attempt to write a more mature novel, the narrator Celeste does not get that tongue-in-cheek style and seems completely serious. When stuff that I will detail later happens, there is no "screwing around" feeling to make me feel better. Just dead serious narration.
Next is our heroine, Celeste Parker. She is supposedly a caring girl who is friends with everyone and an angel. Except that she's not. She volunteers at a senior center and jots down ideas for stories in her notebooks, but these two traits disappear as soon as she falls in love with Brandon. Well, love is pushing it. I call it a mix of hero worship and obsession because she knows nothing about his personality. They barely interact. She interacts with almost no one outside of her social circle. What made me dislike her how she refused to risk anything for what she "believed in." She really likes Brandon, but dating him would mean facing disapproval from the people around her? Okay, she'll just see Brandon in secret and never let anyone see her with him. She can't let her reputation be ruined or fight for her "love." She wants Westsiders to get along with Eastsiders, but being friendly with the former would cause disapproval from the latter? Alright then, she won't even talk to Westsiders unless it's Brandon or she's looking for directions to Brandon's house!
Best of all, there isn't anything that forbids Brandon and Celeste's relationship other than their own prejudices! There are no rules that say they can't except for the unwritten ones that aren't actually rules. Those rules being broken is how change begins. Are they willing to break those not-rules to be together? Absolutely not! They were constantly saying to one another, "You're popular/a Westsider, I can't do this." If they aren't willing to take risks, then I get the feeling that whatever they might have together isn't worth jack shit. How many of you have had to risk something for love or what you believed in? How does it make you feel that these two are unwilling to risk something as "important" as the approval of their classmates to be together when they're "in love" and you've probably had to put a lot more at risk for something worthwhile, lasting, and truly important to you? I'm angry at these two and I haven't even been forced into one of those situations in life yet!
Ivy and Abby, Celeste's best friends, constantly put pressure on her. What they want Celeste to think and feel is more important than her own thoughts and feelings. Once Celeste finds her boyfriend Nash cheating on her, she breaks up with him. Ivy and Abby put on the pressure and try to make Celeste date him again, telling her not a month after the breakup that she should forgive him already. It is Celeste's choice on whether or not to forgive him, not theirs. These two are toxic friends that offer no support at all and their only reasons for why she should get back with him are superficial, such as him being rich and a popular athlete. Nash himself is a cheap ripoff of a character from Vampire Kisses, but with less of a cocky attitude and "self-esteem issues" he uses to manipulate his girlfriend. Does he even have them? Celeste tells us he does, but I don't see it.
This is where the victim blaming come in. Post-breakup, Ivy and Abby pressure Celeste into going to one of Nash's games so that they'll make up. Celeste made plans to go get some stuff she gave Brandon beforehand, so she leaves partway through the game (which she never wanted to be at and has no good reason to stay at) to go get that stuff. While she's there, she witnesses Brandon change into a werewolf. When she goes back to the game, Ivy, Abby, and Nash all gang up on her and chew her out for leaving. Celeste explains that she had stuff to do and she ran into a wolf while she was out. Nash utters this line: "Maybe if you stayed at the game the whole time, you wouldn't be running into wild animals." Everything that came before it led to that line sounding like this to me: "If you had stayed at the game and chosen to support me, your ex-boyfriend that treated you badly, then you wouldn't have had the freak luck to run into a wolf." How does her choice to leave a game she never wanted to be at influence the likelihood of a random happening like running into a wolf? My second and third opinions agreed that this is victim blaming at its best.
I'll end this with minor issues that didn't deserve big paragraphs: lots of telling and not showing; the tag line of the book (Beware a kiss under the full moon. It will change your life forever.) is constantly repeated; and apparently, boys are not allowed to get scared. In addition to being a lazy dreamer, Celeste is also a pretty shitty girlfriend who doesn't do a thing to comfort her boyfriend when he's so scared that he's about to shit a brick or five.
TL;DR The main character is a lazy dreamer/bad girlfriend who won't take any risks; her best friends are toxic and pressure her a lot; her boyfriend/ex-boyfriend uses self-esteem issues to manipulate and is a ripoff of someone else; everyone is too passive; there is victim blaming, gender roles, lots of telling instead of showing, and hero worship/obsession instead of love. And the narrator is completely serious about it all.
And this is supposed to be the first book in a series? Yikes. I still love this author because of what she's done for me, but I will not support this series. As soon as the Vampire Kisses series is finished, I'm done with Ellen Schreiber's books. I am thankful for exactly one thing: at least it wasn't as bad as Angel Star. Once in a Full Moon would have had to put in triple the effort to be as bad as that monstrocity (which would spawn an even longer TL;DR post).
Edit: I have no idea how to use an LJ cut and did it twice over, so I came back to correct that.