Shifting Love, Constance O'Day-Flannery
Shifting Love was Tor's first entry into the paranormal romance publishing arena. If this book is an indicator for the rest of the line, it may come as a disappointment for both fans of romance and of fantasy. What we have here is a general waste of reading time, especially if one is like me and can't suspend their sense of disbelief long enough to get into the plot.
The plot isn't anything particularly special, either. Magdalene "Maggie" O'Shea is a shapeshifter. She was discovered by a mysterious foundation of sorts and then employed to prepare men to meet their true loves (obviously not Maggie) by seducing them and healing their souls. Her current assignment involves fixing wealthy entrepreneur Julian McDonald, a widower who hasn't been able to recover from the death of his wife and son. Maggie doesn't expect to fall for Julian, but of course she does.
I had a lot of problems with this book. The least of them was the lack of connection I felt with both of the main characters. The secret society bits and the equation of Magdalene with the sacred feminine have been done recently in both mainstream thrillers and in speculative fiction; admittedly, I haven't seen them in romance yet, but it's still floating around in the borders of genre. It would be different if these elements would have been handled with skill, but the vagueness in which these are employed does not satisfy my need to know more of the worldbuilding. There were also a lot of New Agey warm-and-fuzzy insertions about love, interconnnected human consciousness, and other such blahblah. The last straw for me were when these were inserted into rants about modern American politics. This sort of preachiness has been mostly on the way out in genre and I didn't expect to see it in a romance.