Review: Silver

SILVER

Rhiannon Held
Adult Urban Fantasy
320 pages
Tor
Available Now
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)

Andrew Dare is a werewolf. He’s the enforcer for the Roanoke pack, and responsible for capturing or killing any Were intruders in Roanoke’s territory. But the lone Were he’s tracking doesn’t smell or act like anyone he’s ever encountered. And when he catches her, it doesn’t get any better. She’s beautiful, she’s crazy, and someone has tortured her by injecting silver into her veins. She says her name is Silver, and that she’s lost her wild self and can’t shift any more.

The packs in North America have a live-and-let-live attitude, and try not to overlap with each other. But Silver represents a terrible threat to every Were on the continent.

Andrew and Silver will join forces to track down this menace while discovering their own power and their passion for each other.

MY THOUGHTS 

Silver is a quiet story for an urban fantasy featuring Weres; the intensity of descriptively violent battles and dominance power plays are notably absent, and in their place is a remarkable young woman who holds our attention as surely as any action sequence ever could. This is not a story that progresses at a frenetic pace, the pages flying by with such speed that our fingers cramp by the time we reach the end, instead we read with a sort of awed reverence for Silver and the trauma she’s so clearly sustained, reading slowly and carefully so as to not miss any clues that will help us figure out exactly what happened to her and how she can regain what she’s so tragically lost.

Silver is an extraordinary young woman, a jittery ball of confusion, madness, and fear when Andrew tracks her down in the very beginning, and while her seemingly incoherent ramblings of Death, the Lady, and snakes have us wanting to keep our distance a bit initially, we quickly come to understand the language of her madness and the intelligence behind each and every word she utters. She’s a victim of appalling cruelty, but as she demonstrates for Andrew again and again, her status as such does not make her weak, nor do the things she sees make her crazy. She simply sees a world that others aren’t privy to, and while many see that as a defect—something to be pitied–both we as readers and Andrew come to see just how strong it makes her, often surprised by the sharp wit that accompanies her discussions with an invisible companion she calls Death.

While there is a subtle thread of romance between Silver and Andrew woven throughout, it possesses the same quiet quality as both Silver and the story itself—no sparks or overwhelming lust, just a beautiful attraction between two people who have walked hand in hand with death, one as a witness to it and one as the hand who dispenses it. Andrew is as interesting a character as Silver, a very strong Were with the dominance to be an alpha should he choose it, but he’s also exceedingly different from a typical shifter alpha male. He doesn’t come across as invincible–able to tear down any opponent who threatens him or Silver–instead he can be physically overpowered at times, showing a vulnerability that seems to make him fit with Silver all the more perfectly, not too alpha as to deny her offer of strength when he needs it, nor too weak to protect her when her own strength fails.

Overall, Silver is a strong debut from Ms. Held, one that has us rooting for our main couple with every fiber of our being and reveling in the emotional complexity they each demonstrate chapter to chapter. This first installment wraps up nicely, leaving room for more without abandoning us to a long list of unanswered questions, and the second book will be immediately added to my list of must-reads as soon as a release date is announced.

Rating: 4/5