Reseda Juarez is dead.
Though she functions as a human, inside she's an emotionless
weapon, trapped between the living and the undead. Cold and unrelenting, she's
used as a super-soldier by the government in a special task force to hunt preternatural
beings to the brink of extinction.
One night, five years ago, Kane killed an innocent and his
brother lost the love of his life. The aftermath forces Kane to become the
alpha of the legendary Thunderbirds. He now must protect what's left of his
family from the tribe of wolf shifters who ripped them apart.
When Reseda's mother is bitten by a wolf, she and Kane are
forced to work together to find the Mayan Pul Yah stone to heal her—the same
stone that gifted Reseda to the life she now lives. But the journey is riddled
with more than the wolves, also searching for the stone.
Something strange happens to their powers when they're
together, and they struggle to fight the intense attraction between them. The
deeper they go, the more secrets unravel, until love is the only thing that can
defeat an enemy no one saw coming.
Thunderstruck
(Thunderbird Brotherhood, book one) by Wren Michaels
Start date: March 15,
2022
End date: March 21,
2022
Rating: 2 ½ out of 5
stars
Content warning: brainwashing, racism
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for
my honest review.
There’s obviously a large amount of suspension of disbelief in stories involving paranormal and supernatural creatures. I’m used to starting a story by assuming magic is real and that supernatural beings live alongside humans. In Thunderstruck, I kept finding myself taken out of the story.
Reseda Juarez is undead or as close
to it as she explains to the reader. (Her backstory is given in chunks by
Reseda herself and then contradicted by others later.) She was brought back to
life by the Canadian government with the Pul Yah stone, a mystical Guatemalan artifact,
following a fatal werewolf attack. In exchange for her rescue, she is a super
soldier in a unit known as the Dolls (inspired by Joss Whedon’s the Dollhouse?)
who hunt werewolves. The effect of the Pul Yah stone means that Reseda
regenerates from injuries quickly and cannot die by normal, human means, and
the downside is she no longer has bodily functions nor emotions. This last
point is often repeated by Reseda.
She spied the Dolls in the darkness, under attack and at a disadvantage. Ambush. The only thought in her mind was to protect the girls. Once upon a time, fear for her friend’s lives would have driven her to the fight. Now, obligation and training kicked in her reflexes. Like automatic muscle memory. (Michaels ch. 2)
Not since she’d been healed by the Pul Yah stone had anything been able to make her feel. A side effect of coming back from the dead was, well, still kind of being dead. Some people thought she was a vampire. Some people thought she was a wolf. What she really was, was dead. A deadening of her senses, emotionally and physically. She could no longer feel…anything. Not pain, not pleasure, not cold or hot. Her body reacted based on muscle memory, but internally, she remained dormant, locked away. (Michaels ch. 4)
Early on,
Reseda shows signs of feeling emotions (prior to her meeting Kane) that suggest
she’s still able to feel emotions but that something is blocking her mentally.
Anxiety that had ripped through her body, riddling her limbs with numbness, dissipated…Beautiful silence broke the scratching in her ears. Emptiness once again settled in her soul. Like always, her insides returned to the hollow shell she carried around…She was once again Reseda Juarez, super-soldier. Cold. Dead. Unfeeling. (Michaels ch. 2)
Here comes something
that throws off my suspension of disbelief. What is revealed later is that the
Dolls’ leader Lieutenant Drake brainwashed Reseda and the others into not
feeling emotions (because it makes them better soldiers) by exposing them to
their greatest fears. I have a hard time believing that the way to make someone
feel no emotions is to expose them to their greatest fear, like hanging an
acrophobic person off the side of a building (a real thing that happened to one
of the Dolls). I would think that would likely make them less afraid of
whatever it was they were initially afraid of (exposure therapy is a thing) but
not cause them to block all emotions. Something else not explained is how Drake
triggers the Dolls’ fears with a Latin word related to their phobia—in Teagan’s
case, deiectus—when none of them presumably know Latin—I base this off
the fact Reseda questions what the words mean at the end of the novel.
Kane gets roped into Reseda’s
craziness when he discovers her mother Glenda injured by a werewolf bite in the
woods outside of his reservation. His grandmother Maquinna recognizes Glenda as
the daughter of her late friend and convinces Kane he must find Glenda’s
daughter Reseda to let her know what has happened to her mother. Reseda shows
up on her own and makes an awful first impression. For some reason, having no
emotions means you say anything that pops into your head and behave like a
degenerate.
Reseda is offensive and casually
racist, mostly to Kane.
“Hey vos, I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to, either. I’m sorry my dying mother is such an inconvenience to you. I can find the stone on my own. I have no problem with that. But seeing as how Grandmother Willow in there won’t tell me where it is, you’re stuck with me. So, can you find it in your heart to not be a total dick for more than five minutes?” (Michaels ch. 6)
“That’s a pretty impressive teepee you got there.” (Michaels ch. 7)
“Your totem pole is poking my belly through your jeans.” (Michaels ch. 9)
“Did you do some weird-ass mojo thing on me? Some kind of First Nations juju?” (Michaels ch. 10)
There’s even this moment where you think Reseda is going to learn her lesson about her behavior, but it completely flies over her head, which is frustrating to read. You want a flawed character to learn from their mistakes, not double down on them, because then it almost reads like an excuse for her behavior.
“Oh, so that’s how you say it. I always thought it was just Nootka.” She shrugged and cocked her head.
He tried to hold back his annoyance. “Everyone always does. We’re the Westcoast People. Nuu-Chah-Nulth. Take some time to learn. What if I just called you Hispanic or Mexican because I was too lazy to find out the difference?”
Reseda pursed her lips. “Fine. I get it. And I’m not Mexican. I’m Guatemalan.”
“My point exactly.” (Michaels ch. 7)
Reseda must locate the Pul Yah
stone to heal her dying mother before she turns into a werewolf (in which case,
Reseda would be obligated to kill her). Kane is the only one who knows where to
find it. What ensues is an exasperating trip with two people who keep having
monumental, sitcom-level misunderstandings. Finding the stone takes them all of
two seconds when they get to the location where Glenda has hidden it. Why does
Glenda, a human, have the stone? Why did she hide the stone and who was she
hiding it from? Why did she hide the stone in the house Kane’s grandfather used
during his spirit quest? All these questions and more Reseda does not ask
herself.
Kane has a secret. The tattoos
across his chest and arms light up like glow sticks whenever Reseda is around
and whenever he uses them to shapeshift. See, he’s a Thunderbird, meaning he
can shapeshift into a giant, mythical bird, which is unlike being able to shape
shift into a wolf form because reasons. When he shifts forms, he loses only his
shirt, which leads to this fourth wall break:
“…I’m thinking you must have just shifted. So, you lose your clothes, but why only your shirt, though? Why do the guys somehow always manage to still keep their pants on?” (Michaels ch. 9)
Years prior, when Kane and his
brothers tried to evacuate people being attacked by werewolves, Kane
accidentally pierced a young woman with his talons, killing her. He believes
that the spirits no longer talk to him because of his mistake. He carries
intense guilt, and because of that, he doesn’t want to help Reseda find the Pul
Yah stone but does almost as penance.
In the time preceding and following
finding the Pul Yah stone, Reseda and Kane constantly fight in what I can only
assume is denied attraction, but, reader, it’s maddening to read. Reseda starts
feeling emotions whenever she’s with Kane, which she doesn’t recognize as
emotions until much later. (This is another instance where I was taken out of
the story. Reseda was 18 years old when she died and came back to…un-life, so
she has 18 years of experience with emotions prior to the 5 years she’s been
undead.) Because of this, she lashes out against him repeatedly. Kane doesn’t
know about her not-quite-human status because she hasn’t told him, so he doesn’t
understand why she’s behaving the way she does. He’s an unsung hero of this
story for putting up with Reseda.
Reseda is the young woman Kane
accidentally killed. The werewolf bite story was given to Reseda so she
wouldn’t know her true ancestry. Reseda is one-quarter werewolf, one-quarter
Nuu-Chah-Nulth (the tribe Kane belongs to), and one-half Guatemalan. Kane
blocked the memory of Reseda but retained the emotions invoked by killing her.
In the epic reveal, it’s discovered that Glenda was never in danger because of the
werewolf bite. Since she’s half werewolf, she couldn’t “turn” into a werewolf
and the bite didn’t harm her. Glenda’s mother was a friend of Maquinna’s who
fled their reservation when she fell in love with a werewolf. She left one
child behind in Canada (who would turn out to be the head of the werewolf clan
attacking everyone) and died in childbirth with Glenda in Guatemala where she
was looking for the Pul Yah stone, which would allow werewolves to shift on
their own terms instead of only during the full moon.
It turns out that Reseda and Kane
are soulmates. Glenda and Maquinna realized this when Reseda activated Kane’s
tattoos on the day that he killed her. They devised this elaborate scheme of
having Reseda and Kane look for the Pul Yah stone for matchmaking purposes.
That’s right. They sent their daughter and grandson out to find an artifact
Glenda hid knowing they could possibly be attacked by werewolves on the off
chance that they would get together.
There’s a
lot of action that’s brushed over that could use more attention paid to it. The
head of the werewolf clan, Castos, is Glenda’s brother, Reseda’s uncle. There’s
a minor plotline about his son, Dominic, dating Kane’s brother, Nodin, that
seems tacked on. Nodin was the alpha of the Thunderbirds until the day Kane
killed Reseda, which Nodin saw as a failure on his part as the head of the clan
(and possibly there was a bit of homophobia and speciesism because he was
dating Dominic). I really wish that that plotline was more fully realized. The
werewolf clan has become radicalized by Castos, and Dominic would like to find
the Pul Yah stone and take control from his father. The Canadian government’s
mission with the Dolls is to eradicate all supernatural creatures, including
the Thunderbirds they just found out existed thanks to Reseda. Drake killed
Reseda’s father as part of his brainwashing training. The headquarters for the
Dolls has a cover as a burlesque club that the Dolls, in addition to their
assassin duties, perform at nightly.
The epilogue seems like the after-credits scene from a Marvel movie. After the main action of the story has ended, some new characters show up on the scene and foretell events that will likely happen in the next story: mainly that Reseda will have a child and Tag, Kane’s other brother, will die. If there’s more showing the reader what the characters are feeling instead of telling the reader, I might be inclined to read the sequel.
Works Cited
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