ARC Review: Bitten by Jordan Stephanie Gray

Crescent City meets Fourth Wing in this fast-paced and romantic debut, in which a teenage girl must survive ruthless werewolves, a glittering court, and deadly politics to exact revenge on the monsters who destroyed her.

After a vicious werewolf attack on the night of her seventeenth birthday party, Vanessa Hart loses everything she loves in a split second. Her best friend, her father, and even her home.

Bitten and imprisoned without explanation, Vanessa endures an agonizing transformation into the very beast that maimed her, and her captors make it clear she cannot escape: she will either swear her life to the Wolf Queen’s Court, or she will die.

With no other choice, Vanessa joins their enchanted Castle Severi—where flowering vines grow through the walls, gifts are bestowed by the stars, and a claw can break through skin as easily as silk—but she hasn’t forgotten what they stole from her.

Vanessa still seeks vengeance, scheming in the shadows even as she finds herself mesmerized by the golden prince Sinclair Severi, who threatens to steal her heart though he is promised to her nemesis. And by his brooding, disgraced cousin, Calix, whose smoldering gaze hides even darker secrets. Immersed in the magic of their whimsical yet cruel society, Vanessa soon learns not all is as it seems.

The Court is at war, and she may simply be a pawn in its lethal game.

For Fans of:
Forbidden Romance
Enemies to Lovers
Werewolves
Paranormal Romance

Title: Bitten

Author: Jordan Stephanie Gray

Publisher: Little Brown Books for Young Readers/Hachette Audio

Expected Publication Date: September 30, 2025

Review:

Thank you to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, Hachette Audio, NetGalley, and Edelweiss for providing me with an early copy of this title to read and give my honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.

I will be honest and say I had cover envy with this book and that's what initially drew me to look at it. I mean, it's an absolutely gorgeous cover. And purple is my favorite color, so I took a chance. And it's been a long time since I've read a truly good urban fantasy wolf story. Though the blurb for this makes it sound more like a fairytale. Everything these days seems to be witches or vampires. But I love me some werewolves so I was ready for a good story. Plus, it just sounded super intriguing and the audio had five different narrators! Unfortunately, I wasn't impressed by this book nor did it live up to what I truly thought it would be. I tried so hard to like it, and pushed through, but in the end I was just disappointed by the entire thing.

Let's start with the narrators. Truly, I thought the book would be in several points of view given how many narrators there were, but that didn't happen. Instead, the book employed what I would normally call duet narration (narrators speaking the parts of the different characters and in this case, several characters), but this was not the case. The story is told from the POV of the main character, Vanessa Hart. And all the other narrators jump in and play their part. While this sounds like it would work (I've listened to lots of full cast audio which I have loved), it just didn't work for me with this book. Not only do I have no idea who narrated what part, I didn't even find much variation in the actual narrators. All the men and women sounded pretty much the same to me. Add to that some sound effects for flashbacks and it was just a jumbled mess. The narrators themselves were not terrible, but, again, it's hard to know who was who given the nature of the single POV of the book.

I tried my hardest to put aside my dislike of how the narration was done and flipped back and forth between Kindle and audio version to give myself a break from the voices in the hopes I would enjoy the story more. This didn't really make a difference for me in how I felt about the book, though.

The book starts out with a bang, jumping right into an action scene, which in and of itself was intense and fun. The main character finds herself bitten and more of less kidnapped to a hidden castle where she lives out her days transforming and learning what it's like to be part of a pack and a royal werewolf court. Unfortunately, you don't get any background on the main character because of this. I have no idea who she is, what she was truly like before, and why she is reacting the way she is during the story.  This stunted her growth and development and it was hard to know if she was changing or had always been the way she was. Add to this a plethora of side characters who are also not well developed and you just have a story that falls flat. I really didn't feel any of the chemistry, connection, or even animosity I was being told I should feel during the story.

This book is also billed as YA. The main character has just turned 17. While I know teens do have sexual encounters and know more about sex than we often think they do, this was in no way closed door. or fade to black. Which is what I am used to when I read YA. Yes, we see kissing, maybe a little groping, but this was beyond that. There was at least one scene that was fairly explicit and spicy. I would rather see the main character a year or two older and this be billed as NA. Plus, the love triangle was just a mess. I'm all for a good why choose, I really am, but I need to have a sense of connection with the characters and reasons why they go in this direction. This book did not give me that. There was zero chemistry build up. Vanessa suddenly is just attracted to these two characters and that's it. Add to this the fact that the two love interests treat Vanessa like garbage and it just didn't work.

The writing, ugh. It was super juvenile. Now, I get that it's billed as YA, but it almost felt as if it wasn't fully edited. So much telling and almost zero showing. And all the adjectives , unnecessary descriptions, and metaphors that were used often made zero sense. It seemed like the author was trying to build something lush but it just came out as cringy.

Finally, the world building is so lacking. I have no real idea of the history of this book. Yes, there is a prologue chapter that gives you some indication of why things are the way they are, but other than that, I didn't understand more than what the eye color meant. Speaking of, the main character has an eye color that is totally unique, but we never learn why. And she is no different than any of the other wolves in the story. Perhaps this may be addressed in the future books but the author should at least give some clue as to what her special eye color means. And because the world building was so poor, the pacing was super slow. I needed more of the royal court politics and the history of the court. The author chooses the "that's how things are" approach and that just does not work for me when reading a fantasy book. It left me with a story that lacked depth.

Unfortunately, this book just was not for me and I won't be moving on in the series. I do see a few good reviews and I encourage people to read a bunch of decide for themselves if they would like to give this one a try.

1.5 stars rounded to 2

Author:

Jordan Stephanie Gray is a long-time daydreamer and writer of the fantastical and romantic and freelance editor to bestselling authors. In her free time, she can be found curled up with her pugs in her lap, rereading her favorite novels while teasing her middle schooler about how much kissing is in her own books (a lot). She invites you to visit her at authorjordangray.com and to follow her on instagram @authorjordangray.

Jordan Stephanie Gray is the author of the young adult paranormal romantasy, Bitten, and the adult mermaid romantasy, The Wicked Sea.

When she isn’t lounging by the pool and typing away at her computer, she is likely cuddling her pugs in sunny Florida.