3.5-ish stars.

Warnings:
Non-romance. There are some smooches, sex, even attempts at "i love you", but - no, not a romance.
Elements of horror.

One full star off for Present Tense. I find it generally awkward and unnatural, bordering creepy, unless it's tied to the story/characters, like [b:The Silvers|29584533|The Silvers|Jill Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1460174832s/29584533.jpg|40165685], where one of the MCs lives "in the present" and processes everything accordingly.

0.3 stars off for the urn shuffle. The whole business is rather fishy and springs an unhealthy amount of unanswered questions.

Why did the foxes give Spencer Rourke's urn? I mean, they knew whose urn it was, so - wtf? Why didn't Rourke hide the urn right away considering the huge importance of it or returned it back to the foxes asap, even though it was a fake? He did realize it was his urn, not Craine's. Why didn't he say anything to Spencer, the whole mess could have been avoided. So, once again - wtf? Oh, right. So that the mess story could go on.

0.2 stars off for non-american feel. I kept thinking I am in Europe somewhere, no matter how much the author wanted me to believe otherwise.

Anyway, a very entertaining read. Rounding down to 3 (considering the rough beginning) and moving onto book 2. ( )

Spencer Cain is barely making it through high school but it's not for lack of intelligence. With his mother battling mental illness, Spencer as no choice but to run cons to keep food on the table. This all would have been so much easier if his deadbeat father hadn't decided to walk out one day. When Spencer gets word that his long absent father has died, he believes that at least the man can do him and his mother no more harm, at least until he finds out the truth about who his father really was. It seems that Spencer is half human and half Coyote. This knowledge quickly launches Spencer into a supernatural world that he is scarce prepared to deal with despite the fact that he has spent his eighteen years running cons.

This book is pretty action and plot driven – we hit the ground running. Spencer learns he is supernatural and almost immediate begins charging through the plot at great speed. We quickly get him running head first into this world, pulling of tricks and learning as fast as he can do. We get some decent stories and history from Rourke and some entertaining hints of the nature of the competition between the three races, the sneaky, fun, yet sometimes lethal and serious nature of these prankster races constantly battling for bragging rights against each other.

It’s fun, it’s fast, it’s funny. Did I mention fun? Because that’s the main tone I have from this book, certainly to begin, Spencer is out of his depth but while so many protagonists would mope and despair, Spencer ran with it. I found myself reading this book extremely quickly because it happily pulled me in. It was one of those books where I blink and then see the book has finished.

The downside to this fun rocking charge through the plot is that the story doesn’t get into much depth with the world. Which is a real shame because I really really want to know. I want to know more about the powers of a Bard, the power of stories, I want to know more about the three races of tricksters, their histories, their powers, their natures, I want to know more about the curses

I love the idea that then Kitsune are meticulous planners while the Coyotes wing it and have a lot of luck to various degrees of success and stability. I like the idea that the three races of trickster have very different ways of being tricksters – this is great but I want to know far more about this. We only touch on it in passing and then leap forward to the next part of the plot. It generally works – I can still easily follow the book (though more information about the Sorcerers would have helped) but more would have helped a lot

I find Spencer to be a fun protagonist. He’s a rogue – but he’s not malicious with it. He’s fun, doesn’t take anything too seriously but isn’t so light hearted to be frustrating. His relationship with his mother is also utterly, painfully poignant – having to navigate around his mother’s mental illness, respecting her, loving her but deeply strained trying to support and help her. This really does bring out a part of Spencer’s character that is touching, caring and hurting that adds a lot of humanisation to the character. It’s powerful but there is a problem with mental illness basically being used as character development for another character. But it is extremely powerful – we don’t undermined his mother’s authority as his mother, nor the emotional bond between them and minors having to support parents with mental illnesses. It’s very real, very raw and very powerful

Spencer is bisexual – which is definitely a rare find in this genre. We hardly ever see LGBTQ protagonists in this genre and less bisexual male protagonists, so this definitely interests me

I also really like the way the sex is portrayed, being much more graphic than we often see, but also much less formulaic without unnecessary gender roles or patterns I see a lot

What I’m much less a fan of is Spencer’s sexual partner – Rourke. Rourke is an older bisexual man – and I’m quite happy to see an LGBTQ character be older and be portrayed as sexual and sexy (and not older in an “is thousand years old but looks 20” kind of way). This is definitely a plus. What isn’t so much is that Spencer at least begins the book referring to Rourke as “uncle” and clearly sees him in some level of, if not parental then certainly something close to it. No he’s not family, but he was a close friend of his parents and has clearly watched Spencer grow up. Further, some mojo between them makes Spencer and him especially horny. I’m not saying that it removed his consent but it likely increased the amount of sex they had. Finally Rourke announces his love for Spencer very quickly and tries to pressure Spencer into becoming his consort.

It’s a shame because there’s so much about their relationship that is very realistic untroped and very real compared to what is out there that I’ve read, but these flaws are not things I can exactly celebrate. On the flip side I really like Spencer didn’t run with this. Rourke may apply pressure, even if he is troubled by this, but Spencer knows his own mind, Spencer knows his own heart and we don’t have him fall head over heels with Rourke. His clear happy to be friends and friends with benefits with Rourke rather than to declare eternal love after a few days is very nicely done as it goes against so many tropes.

We also have a trans character with one of the kitsune, Shisko, who is one of the more prominent characters and definitely one of the more capable characters in the book. While she is clearly trans and isn’t stereotyped in any way she is referred to in highly pejorative terms including “mister-sister”. Yes, it’s by a clear villain but there’s no real challenge of his language and being a villain is not sufficient to that. Even when the protagonists learn about Shisko we get this:

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An interesting, fantastical fairytale with a to be continued ending. 4 stars ( )

I bought this book ages ago and only just now got around to reading it. I had some trouble with it, at first. Although I usually like snarky first-person POV in urban fantasy, Spencer was almost too “gray area” for me, and his relationship with Rourke was too much, too soon. I sometimes had trouble following what was going on, because snark tended to win out over clear descriptions, and I wish some things had been explained sooner (I never did catch what the deal was with Shiko and Spencer's coat). By the end, though, I was enjoying myself and happy that my weakness for Samhain's “new releases” sales meant I already owned the next two books.

Almost every single character in this book is a trickster, and almost no one can be trusted. This includes Spencer. He's 18 years old and the only person in the world he really loves is his mother. His father walked out on the family a while back, and his mom's mental state is fragile. Spencer keeps things going as best as possible with money earned from short cons. He's particularly good with cards.

His life becomes much more dangerous when “Uncle” Rourke visits and tells him that his father has died and has requested that he give the eulogy. Spencer learns that his father was not human. He was a Coyote, Spencer is half-Coyote, Rourke is King of the Phouka, and Spencer has a bunch of family members he never knew about who trick him into having to steal back his father's ashes from the Kitsune, the Foxes.

It's a big mess. There's a feud between the Kitsune and the Coyotes, and the Phouka are supposed to be neutral. Spencer's in the thick of things right away, and he has no idea what's going on. One of my problems with the book was that, while Spencer pulled off a bunch of amazing tricks, in many cases it was more dumb luck than actual cleverness and skill. For example, he “tricked” Rourke multiple times without even trying to do so – he often didn't realize what he'd accomplished until someone told him later on. Does it count as a con if the con artist wasn't aware of what he was doing?

I had a hard time liking Spencer. He was a bit too obsessed with TV tropes and zombies (I thought the zombie thing was a joke, at first, but I think Spencer might have been completely serious about all of it). He couldn't seem to go near people without lying to them or conning them – sometimes it was as if his body acted on its own, cheating people out of their money without any input necessary from his brain. And he was unbelievably horny. I'm hoping that future books tone down this side of him, because he tended to be more interesting when he wasn't focused on sex to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Yeah, sure, so part of the reason for that was that he was a Coyote, but it's like the ardeur in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books: it's really just an excuse for the author to include lots of sex scenes.

Spencer and Rourke's relationship did not appeal to me for a good chunk of the book. When Rourke was first introduced, it was as Uncle Rourke. Spencer was quick to tell readers that he wasn't a blood relation, just a friend of his father's who'd been teaching him card tricks for years. This detail should have been my first clue that they were going to hop into bed with each other, but, to be honest, I didn't catch any kind of sexual vibe between them. Rourke was a charmer where Spencer's tutor was concerned, but that was it. And then Spencer and Rourke got a taste of satyr's wine, and it wasn't long before they were all over each other. Meanwhile, my brain was still stuck on “Uncle Rourke” and “he's been around since I was born.” Those details plus graphic sex scenes did not mix well. And that was before other details were revealed that added new icky dimensions to their relationship.

Spencer and Rourke's relationship didn't even make all that much sense to me. I mean, okay, sex. But then Rourke started talking about love. Rourke, the King of the Phouka, who's been around for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Spencer's an 18-year-old mortal half-Coyote who's sometimes a bit of an idiot. I couldn't see why someone like Rourke would be so stupid as to claim to love him after a few rounds of good sex. By comparison, Spencer was surprisingly level-headed. He knew that what he felt for Rourke was lust, maybe affection, but not love. And, because he was a Coyote and therefore lied as easily as breathing, he lied to Rourke about his feelings. On the one hand, I hated him for doing that. On the other hand, Rourke, a supposed trickster, was stupidly leaving himself wide open.

Although I never completely got over the icky elements of their relationship, I did eventually grow more comfortable with them being together, once it was revealed that Rourke wasn't quite as stupid as he seemed. I look forward to seeing how things go in the next books.

I also hope that future books flesh out the overall world more. Coyote's Creed focused mostly on Coyotes, specifically Spencer's messed up, back-stabbing family. Beyond what little Rourke says about himself and his own abilities, not much information is given about the Phouka. Since they were participants in the Feud, the information on the Kitsune was a little better (whereas Coyotes are short con experts, Kitsune prefer long cons). Even if he didn't realize exactly what he'd accomplished until he'd done it, Spencer's trick on Kazuhiro was fun, and I hope Shiko becomes a recurring character.

The ending was probably my favorite part of the whole book. It was beautiful and bittersweet, and it fit perfectly. While the bulk of the book was on the good side of “okay,” the ending was wonderful. Here's hoping the next couple books are at least as good.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )

This book was different, it wasn't a typical romance, more of a HFN than an HEA. What should have been icky actually made sense. Spencer's dad walked out on his family when he was little, and his dad's friend Rourke picked up the slack, even took Spence in for a while when his mom was unable to care for him. So it should have been really gross when Spencer and Rourke get closer, but the way the world is explained, with a sort of "Awakening", the ability to see the abnormal, made me believe Spence could suddenly see someone like Rourke in a new way.

There were lots of threads left open, so I can see this book having a sequel, and I will definitely be there for the ride. ( )