Guest Review: Hot and Badgered by Shelly Laurenston

Reviewer: Tracy
Hot and Badgered (Honey Badgers Chronicles #1) by Shelly Laurenston
Publisher: Kensington
Publication Date: March 27th 2018
Format: eARC
Genres: Paranormal Romance
Pages: 400
Add It: Goodreads
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It’s not every day that a beautiful naked woman falls out of the sky and lands face-first on grizzly shifter Berg Dunn’s hotel balcony. Definitely they don’t usually hop up and demand his best gun. Berg gives the lady a grizzly-sized t-shirt and his cell phone, too, just on style points. And then she’s gone, taking his XXXL heart with her. By the time he figures out she’s a honey badger shifter, it’s too late.

Honey badgers are survivors. Brutal, vicious, ill-tempered survivors. Or maybe Charlie Taylor-MacKilligan is just pissed that her useless father is trying to get them all killed again, and won’t even tell her how. Protecting her little sisters has always been her job, and she’s not about to let some pesky giant grizzly protection specialist with a network of every shifter in Manhattan get in her way. Wait. He’s trying to help? Why would he want to do that? He’s cute enough that she just might let him tag along—that is, if he can keep up . . .

Charlie, Max and Stevie are all half-sisters.  They all have the same no good, thieving, idiot father who is constantly getting himself into trouble.  The problem with that is that people think they can get to their father through his daughters.  Not!  Charlie, Max and Stevie were all raised first by Charlie’s mother and then when she died, by Charlie’s grandfather in a wolf pack.  Charlie is half honey badger and half wolf.  Max is all honey badger and Stevie is half honey badger, half tiger.  They’re all incredibly dangerous and can take anyone who comes after them.  That doesn’t mean they want to.

When the girls’ father once again gets them into the middle of things, Charlie, Max and Stevie take help from an unlikely source.  Berg is a bear shifter and completely smitten with Charlie.  He offers to help house them and they end up renting a house in an all bear neighborhood. Berg just happens to live across the street so this is convenient for him to be near Charlie as much as possible.

When the girls finally figure out what they father has done to get people after them they try to remedy the situation, but a wedding their not invited to, twin aunts who have no idea they’re shifters and a psychopathic cousin make this incredibly difficult.  With help from a bunch of unlikely sources the girls try to make their lives as normal as possible.

I love honey badgers. LOL  They are tough and don’t take anyone’s shit.  They can fight anyone and probably win and have a blasé attitude while doing it.  This particular group of honey badgers made me laugh constantly.  I love the way that Laurenston writes and her characters are always so alive and so incredibly irreverent.

This was Charlie and Berg’s romance but their relationship was so entwined into the story that it was more about everything else going on.  That actually worked for me.  There was SO much going on in this book that to add more of the romance wouldn’t have felt right.

I adored Charlie, Max and Stevie’s relationship. They were constantly at war with each other, yet they loved each other dearly and would have each other’s back in a hot minute.  Charlie was very protective of her sisters and especially Stevie as she kind of had her head in the clouds.  She’s a complete genius and was in her head a bit more than she was in reality.  When people try to take Stevie for her big brain Charlie does everything she can to stop it.  The girls may not hug each other on a regular basis but I could feel the love between the three.

I can’t tell you all the little bits of this book because A) there are a lot of bits! And B) you need to read it for yourself in order to get what’s going on.  This was a fun and crazy book and I really enjoyed it.  A great start to a new series that still includes people from other series that we already know and love.

Rating: 4 out of 5

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