Full Moon Kisses by Ellen Schreiber

Full Moon Kisses by Ellen Schreiber, pub. December 2012, 224 pg.

Rating: 0/5 stars

Spoiler Alert: If you have any interest in reading the Full Moon series by Ellen Schriber, do not read this post. It's full of spoilers from the entire series. If you'd like to read a semi-amusing post about why I absolutely hated this series, please continue!

Full Moon Kisses, the third and final installment of the Full Moon series by Ellen Schreiber, is one of the worst books I have ever had the misfortune of reading.

I’m not a huge fan of paranormal romances to begin with, but I can tolerate them if they’re at least well written.

Sadly, this book was a compost heap of poor writing, tired plot lines and flat characters. Every aspect of it has already been done in some way, shape or form.

Celeste, the main character, is a high school junior from the town of Legend’s Run – a place with a long heritage of werewolf folklore.

I bet you can guess where this is headed.

In the first two books of the series, we are introduced to Celeste’s life. She’s dating Nash, the school’s star athlete, and her two best friends are dating his two best friends. Everything is perfect.

However, it’s all uprooted when Brandon Maddox, a new guy from the “wrong side of town,” whom Celeste is irresistibly attracted to, saves her from a pack of wolves. Brandon is bitten in the process and eventually turns into a werewolf. Then Nash gets attacked by a wolf and turns into a werewolf as well. Following that, everything goes crazy.

In this newest offering, a troop of werewolves (who happen to be Brandon’s athletic rivals from his old school) show up, and their leader decides he’s also in love with Celeste, so he hatches a devious plot to take her away from Brandon.

To make matters worse, Brandon’s scientist father has devised a werewolf cure (a mixture of things involving moon dust obtained from NASA scientists) for his son to take, only Brandon isn’t sure if he’s ready to give up being a werewolf.

Now, I’m not saying this book would have been a masterpiece even if it had been well written, but, when an author continuously changes crucial plot points and misuses words, it loses any chance it ever had.

Schreiber threw big words wherever she could fit them without checking their definitions first – half of them didn’t make any sense at all, and the other half sounded awkward anyway.

She changed the way that people could become werewolves more times than I can count. At first, you just had to be bitten by a wolf. Then, you had to be bitten by a wolf under a full moon or be bitten and also get kissed under a full moon. Finally, it only happened if you were suffering from a wolf bite while also being a descendant of the town’s original werewolf.

And the werewolves are not your typical werewolves. The guys who “suffer from the lycan condition” just get more attractive.

They may sprout fangs, but they also become more muscular and grow goatees. Their hair gets a little shaggier, and they look enough like a regular person that no one really notices they’re werewolves unless they look really closely.

The characters in the novels were all stereotypes – the jock, the nice guy, the popular girl, the sporty girl. None of them had any personality at all, and I tended to forget about them as soon as I turned the page.

Celeste was just a blank canvas of a person in the style of Bella Swan from the “Twilight” series. I’d offer an educated guess that this was so girls who read this series can easily imagine themselves as her.

Even with all that being said, I think I still would have been able to tolerate this book if it had some kind of plot. But it didn’t.

If you took out the terribly written Nash-Celeste-Brandon love triangle, this entire series would still just be about a girl who falls in love with a boy who becomes a werewolf, but she’s totally okay with it. And nothing else happens.

If you’re a fan of paranormal romances and are looking for the next great read, I would avoid this one at all costs. If you’re looking for a book to practice your editing skills on or to buy your 12-year-old sister for her birthday, then this one might be for you.

Originally published in The Royal Purple on Jan. 30, 2013