From the road.

So I am traveling this week, but I finished a book this morning before I started my road trip and wanted to get a quick review up.

Book Info:  Burning Wild by Christine Feehan (Leopard Series). Published by Jove in 2009.

This one I just did a quick review read. It was something to read to help me fall asleep and then to finish quickly this morning before I hit the road. I have read it many times before so the story wasn't new and I was braced for the violence. I even skimmed the romance scenes because I wasn't in the mood.

Yet, as with all the other Feehan novels, I still enjoyed it. The leopard series that Feehan writes revolves around a society of shape shifters. They are both human and leopard and they must learn to control their own animalistic nature. The nature of the leopard, for the purpose of these stories, is possessive of their mates and very domineering. There are many critics of these stories for that reason. As a romance writer, Feehan steps into an in-between world. She is not a BDSM author, yet these leopard stories, especially the story of Jake and Emma, include aspects of a Dominant/Submissive relationship. Not completely, and from what I understand (which is very little), those that truly understand that type of life style would not consider this relationship to be such. Yet, for those uninitiated, it can be considered too extreme and therefore get categorized as such.
I tend to disagree with the rest of the uninitiated. I don't believe this is a Dom/Sub story. This is the story of a woman who teaches a man, not only how to love, but how to understand love. The character of Jake was a tortured soul. He was physically, verbally, and emotionally abused for most of his life. He has trained himself to cut off all emotion as a protection. In true romance genre fashion, Emma must teach him how to understand and to even express his own emotions.