Hot and Badgered – Shelly Laurenston
Series: The Honey Badger Chronicles
Type of book: Audiobook
Narrrator: Traci Odom
Length: 13h 15 min

Synopsis from Goodreads:
It’s not every day that a beautiful naked woman falls out of the sky and lands face-first on grizzly shifter Berg Dunn’s hotel balcony. Definitely they don’t usually hop up and demand his best gun. Berg gives the lady a grizzly-sized t-shirt and his cell phone, too, just on style points. And then she’s gone, taking his XXXL heart with her. By the time he figures out she’s a honey badger shifter, it’s too late.

Honey badgers are survivors. Brutal, vicious, ill-tempered survivors. Or maybe Charlie Taylor-MacKilligan is just pissed that her useless father is trying to get them all killed again, and won’t even tell her how. Protecting her little sisters has always been her job, and she’s not about to let some pesky giant grizzly protection specialist with a network of every shifter in Manhattan get in her way. Wait. He’s trying to help? Why would he want to do that? He’s cute enough that she just might let him tag along—that is, if he can keep up . . .

This book is a bit bananas and quite absurd. I do not think it tries to be anything else and that is what makes it work. I do have a few thoughts.

I like that family is present in this book. There are some people missing, some people that we (the main characters) do not like and then there is the three sisters that stick together. I feel like the main character often is isolated from family and sometimes also friends in a lot of books so it was pleasant to have some family present and close.

There was not a lot of shifting. I thought that we would see a lot more of shifted shifters, especially when we were in more shifter territory. Maybe we will get more shifting in the upcoming books when we have a different main character?

There are some unanswered questions, things that I did not feel like I got an answer to. But, since it is part of a series, perhaps we get those answers later.

For quite some time, I felt like the cover of this book was quite misplaced. I do imagine that the books that typically has these covers has more naked in them than fighting than the other way around. I do still think that the cover could have been different, I would have liked the sisters or a badger or something on the cover, but the last part of the book was maybe more to what the cover promises. I do wish that there would have been more spoken consent. We did not get anything that either character did not want but it would have been nice to have the question, at least waiting for an encouragement or something before diving in.

There is some mental illness representation in this book. I have not done any research about the book nor author so I do not know the background of why it is here but my interpretation of it is a kind of normalising about the topic that is done in a jokingly kind of manner.

A lot of things happens in this book. It almost feels like this book could have been separated into several books. The red line throughout the book was not very clear, things just keep happening and the direction was a bit fuzzy. the events were no really connected in a way that drove the plot forward. Since the whole book is a bit bananas, I accept and take it.

I gave this book 3 out of 5 stars – I enjoyed it and I have already started on the next book in the series.