Felicity Heaton, $2.99, ISBN 978-1911485308
Fantasy Romance, 2022

Felicity Heaton’s Claimed by Her Cougar is part of the Cougar Creek Mate series… you know, just from looking at the cover and the names of the title and series, I have no idea whether I’ve already read this thing.

The titles and the covers of these things are all so similar that I will likely need to create some kind of gigantic Excel sheet to keep things straight, but that’s a lot of work for a type of Story that all share and use the same tropes over and over.

In fact, you probably have an idea of the plot of this thing already just from looking at the cover and the title, and chances are you’d be mostly right.

Rath, our hero, is basically a mountain man with the cougar thing being a cheat sheet of sorts for instant love. He starts the story telling me about how much it hurts to recall his dead mate—killed by humans, hunters that for some reason take down creatures stronger, faster, and more hung than they because surely there is no reason why anyone would fear these shifters.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because all his brooding is just a huge sign from the author telling me that a new mate is just around the corner… I mean a few paragraphs down.

Rath stilled again.

It wasn’t a male.

It was a female.

A curvy brunette who looked as stunned as he felt as the mist cleared between them and she lifted her head and blinked at him.

She wasn’t a hunter either.

She had been shooting, but it wasn’t a gun she had aimed at him.

It was a camera.

I hope you people like this kind of narrative, because this story is loaded with this thing.

By the way, isn’t it awful of Rath to immediately assume the other person’s gender and pronouns? According to the people of hair color on social media, this is a cancel-worthy action because Rath could have murdered—murdered!—a genderqueer non-binary twitterkin tiktoksexual with such hate think. He probably touches himself to JK Rowling’s photo in the bathroom. Who wants to throw the first stone at this transphobe?

Anyway, our heroine Ivy is a photographer, as the author will explain in scintillating prose.

Black bears.

If she could get some photographs of a mother with cubs in undisturbed habitat, it would be incredible, perfect for her series on Canadian bears, an idea she had hit on last year when trying to shatter a creative wall that had left her close to giving up photography altogether.

Yasmin had talked her through it, always the voice of reason and support, convincing her not to give up just yet and to think of a project that could stir her passion again.

Ivy was glad that she had listened and had decided to try a series on bears, because some of the photos she had taken of grizzlies in the fall had restored her faith and now she had found the energy she had been missing, the enthusiasm she had always had for photography.

It wasn’t her work. It was her passion.

Wait a minute, a heroine in such a story that doesn’t need protection? How can that be?

She wasn’t sure she had ever ventured so far into the wilderness before, and she hadn’t realised it would put her so on edge, afraid of every noise she heard. She had been so caught up in the fact the person she had spoken to at a bar in Golden, deep in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, had told her he had seen a lot of bears in this valley in the past that she hadn’t really thought about how remote it was.

Or how alone she was.

Normally when she headed into the wilder places in the world, she had a guide with her.

This time, she was flying solo.

Looking for bears.

Damn, she hoped she hadn’t made a terrible mistake by trekking into the middle of nowhere and wasn’t about to meet a grisly end.

Pun intended.

Well, that last line surely clears things up! Ha, ha, the heroine is stupid, but she can still make a pun. I can’t wait to see what other puns she will come up when she’s lost, hungry, dehydrated, and chased by horny bears like some pornographic version of that Leonardo DiCaprio movie.

A shape loomed in the mist, disturbing it, and her heart lodged in her throat, a thrill chasing through her as she pressed down on the shutter release, sure it was a bear.

But as the mist parted, it wasn’t a bear that emerged.

It was a man.

A mountain of one.

Oh my god, these horrible people! There are 9,751 genders and 29,164,236 pronouns so stop assuming everyone is AMAB or AFAB! What is this, a JK Rowling fan convention?

The rest of the story is all about Rath looming over and protecting Ivy from all kinds of dangers she has little clue about, as she takes a bath, shivers longingly at the sight of Rath’s hot body, and the whole thing is so boring—not to mention a hate crime against tiktoksexuals, twittergenderbenders, and persons of hair color everywhere—that I would sell my soul to Elon Musk to have a few grizzly bears show up and turn this story into a present day reboot of that Grizzly movie.

The eye-rolling writing style doesn’t help. In fact, it only aggravates my annoyance that the author manages to take all the tired old tropes of shifter romance and comes up with an even more boring retread of the same old, same old.

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