Review: Darkest Fear by Cate Tiernan

Title: Darkest Fear (Birthright #1)
Author: Cate Tiernan
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Release date: January 7th 2014
Source: Edelweiss
Format: eARC

Rating: 2/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

Vivi’s animal instincts are her legacy—and maybe her downfall—in this start to a romantic fantasy series that will appeal to fans of The Nine Lives of Chloe King.

Vivi has known the truth about her family—and herself—since she was thirteen. But that doesn’t mean she’s accepted it. Being Haguari isn’t something she feels she’ll ever accept. How can she feel like anything but a freak knowing that it’s in her genes to turn into a jaguar?

Now eighteen, Vivi’s ready to break away from the traditions of her heritage. But all of that changes with the shocking, devastating deaths of her parents and the mysteries left behind. Vivi discovers family she never even knew she had, and a life open with possibility. New friends, new loyalties, and even romance all lay ahead—but so do dangers unlike anything Vivi ever could have imagined.

Darkest Fear is a book I was eager to read and that caught my attention because the main character is transformed into a jaguar, and I really like books about shifters and was intrigued to see how they handled the origins of these Haguaris. But the truth is that I struggle a lot with this book, I was about to drop it because I felt that nothing was happening when in fact they were a lot of things happening because Vivi and her parents are attacked by a jaguar and from the attack only Vivi survives, she is devastated, she doesn´t kkow what to do without her parents and all her relatives live in Brazil, but she didn´t want to move or going for a short visit, so because she has eighteen years old, doesn´t need a guardian and can stay living in the parental home.

But searching through the important documents from her parents, she discovers something that makes her travel to New Orleans, where she meets new friends, find a job and begins to accept her legacy a bit, because until that moment she hated the fact of being a Haguari and wanted no part of it, but in this new environment she begins to see gradually that being Haguari is not been a monster, and that been a Haguari isn´t the worst thing that could happen to her in the world. So between rediscovering her heritage, making new friends, meeting a guy that she´s attracted to and try to discover what really happened to her parents, Vivi starts to get away from the deep depression that she had.

As a main character I didn´t like Vivi that much, maybe it can be that I got to see a Vivi  tha´s devastated by the death of his parents, with terrible feelings of guilt and falling into a severe depression, so during the most of the book she cries a lot and rightly so for what happen to her, but I just do not like her character.

Overall, Darkest Fear is not a story that I really liked, is very slow, I felt flat at times and I was not captured by the characters, plus it has an abrupt end. Definitely this book was not for me.

I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange of an honest review.