Here I am on a trip down memory lane. Since I am just a little bit OCD about reading the series from start to finish, I am starting my run on the True Blood Mate series.
Now to be completely honest, I have always had a love/hate --- no -- more like love/drive me crazy relationship with Stormy and her books. I love the originality of many of her plots, but the writing annoys the hell out of me. The holes, jumps, sentence structure and tendency to tell us instead of show us are all annoying. Then there are the Junkers - where the creative parts are tiny and the reuse of scenes plentiful. But still - I am drawn to her stories.
This past week I read another reviews comments and went "Bingo!" that is it! They said - to paraphrase - That this juxtaposition of great ideas for stories and terrible writing skills made her think of an oral story teller - one of the old style with the skill, creativity, and ability to tell a spell binding tale around the fire, but who had never learned how to translate that into a written story.
Heart Song is an excellent example of that juxtaposition of abilities.
Now having said that - I will be marking this a 4/5 for the story ( )

I am so not sure what to think about darren and asher's relationship, but there were a few thing I had problems with.

Even though darren kept saying he had a problem adjusting, i think he did it pretty fast. Why did he fall into the wife mode for me because I just felt him always needing to be rescued. I mean, he's a man and he's hiding in the closet from a woman with a knife! a old woman at that. Just didn't cut (no pun intended) as climax or drama for me at all.

Asher character was basically so flat I couldn't even make up a physical description in my head of him, and that left me practically blinded throughout the whole story.

I was excited with how this started up, but it got annoying when they kept discussing the same thing over and over. Adjusting and how he is sorry, and how they know each other in ten years already. Plus ash crying at inopportune times for things I did not find was necessary. I don't know where I heard of this author but I decided to give her a chance and am disappointed for the lack of spark in her plot lines and characters.

I tried three of her books before this one, each a start of one of her pack series and they didn't weigh in. this was the only one I could stomach, but i guess I set my expectations too high. ( )

I really liked this book. It was a nice variation on the 'finding your mate' idea, with a long separation and several obstacles before the main characters finally manage to get together. Or are forced together, rather, because the danger to Darren, a vet, becomes too great for Asher, a werewolf alpha, to leave him unprotected any longer.

I loved Darren. He was incredibly strong to have survived for 10 years, thinking the voice in his head was a left-over effect from the fall he took. Being told he was crazy, even going on medication, and still being able to function made him an alpha in his own right. It also meant that he took no shit from Asher, stood up for himself and gained his respect much more easily than had he just been the 'weak human' who was introduced to the pack.

Asher was also a wonderful character. His suffering, though he knew all along that he wasn't crazy, wasn't any less than Darren's. He knew his mate was out there, even stayed in touch with him, but could never be close. He then had to go through his mate adapting to the idea that he was real. I loved that this wasn't easy on him, that it took him a while to understand how Darren had suffered.

If you like reading about two strong men learning to live together, facing external enemies as well as uncertainties in their relationship, and learning how to love together, you will probably like this story as much as I did. ( )

Liked a little better on a re-read. Original date in jun 2012. ( )

I always enjoy Stormy Glenn's writings, another series I have to keep up with. ( )