Review: Tiger Magic by Jennifer Ashley

Tiger Magic
(Shifters Unbound #5)
by Jennifer Ashley
Publisher: Berkley
Publication date: June 4, 2013
Gere: Paranormal Romance
Rating:

He was once a captive, but his urges were never caged. Now he’ll release them on a beautiful stranger whose own secret desires are longing to be sated…

He doesn’t have a name. He doesn’t have a clan. The humans who held him prisoner for forty years have taken them away. He knew nothing but captivity until nearly a year ago, when he was released into the light. Now Tiger lives in the Austin Shiftertown, where he struggles to belong and searches for an identity.

Carly Randal thinks her fabulous life is complete—until her car breaks down on the side of the road, and a wild-looking Shifter is the only one to help her. Tiger takes one look at Carly and knows instantly—she will be his mate. As Carly is drawn into his Shifter world, she risks everything she has for that forbidden something she still wants: passionate love.

Tiger is someone we met at the end of the last book when he is saved from a research facility. He was created by humans to be a test subject. They’ve run various tests on him to see how much pain and abuse he can endure. Out of the other test subjects, he was the only one that survived. He’s had a really horrible life and when we met him in the previous book, he was very feral. However, we get to see Tiger start to adapt to being free, or at least as free as the humans allow shifters to be under their control. He is no longer caged, starved, and tortured at least. Even though he is free from the research facility, he still has a target on his back and there is still interest and concern about the rare tiger that seems to be rather resilient to death.

Not only do we have the humans coming in trying to get their hands on Tiger for more testing, but the other Shifter leaders are concerned about Tiger and don’t trust him. They want him Collared with the magical collar that contains the beast (something that would ultimately kill Tiger) or have him executed. It was sad to see that even though he was free and with other Shifters, he was still viewed upon as different, and just about everyone treated him as if he were a ticking time bomb.

Carly was the only person that didn’t treat him differently. She didn’t always have one eye on him, or worried about how he’d react to certain situations. Every time Tiger reacted with force towards something, she reasoned that it was a normal response. You wake up with bullet holes in your abdomen, chained to a hospital bed, with military men pointing rifles at you? Of course you’re going to go crazy and start tearing stuff up. He was frightened, in pain, and fighting for his life. There were so many times when everyone around Tiger would say his behavior was volatile and Carly would look at them as if THEY were crazy for suggesting Tiger would harm anyone for no reason at all. It was her belief and trust in him that really broke my heart, because she was the only one that truly believed in him.

I loved that this story have so many things going on at once. Like I said before, we have the humans trying to get him back for experiments, the Shifters who want him contained and controlled, the romance between him and Carly, and the big question of why Tiger was created in the first place. What was their end goal when the created him? The pieces fall into place during this book and you realize that Tiger wasn’t created to be a killing machine like so many fear… but you’re going to have to read the book to figure it out. 😉

Favorite quote…

“He was so tender, this man people feared. He’d shielded her body with his and taken what should have been a lethal barrage of bullets so Carly wouldn’t be hurt.”