I love Shelly Laurenston. Her books are always hilarious and full of action and fluff. I haven't read the Pride series, but this can be read as standalone - at least I don't think I've missed anything much.

I loved all the characters in this. I started to type which but then realised I listed all the characters. They were all amazing - Charlie, Max and Stevie and the triplets. And Kyle. And Dutch. See my problem? It was all just fantastic. The plot was crazy and insane and I loved every minute, chuckling my way through the one liners.

My only complaint and one which I feel the need to take half a star for is the language. At one point the c*** word is used and I hate that word so utterly much. It's only used once, but it was so unnecessary - it added nothing and jolted me out of my enjoyment of the narrative. Maybe I'm crazy, but I prefer that word to be absent from my vocabulary. So 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.

Beth C.

Written on Nov 9, 2018

Ok, I admit - it was much more entertaining than I assumed it would be. Yes, I will probably read book 2, even though this is not my typical genre. When it can make me laugh out loud in parts, and smirk in others, it's worth it :)

nitzan_schwarz

Written on Oct 2, 2018

3.5

Okay, so this was fun, as always. If you're looking for a crazy, fun romance with paranormal elements, Shelly Laurenston is your girl.

That being said, this wasn't the most fun I've had with a Shifter story. For one, while I defintely felt the attraction between Charlie and Berg, and thought they made a GREAT couple, I didn't really feel the "love". Like, I felt like they would get there FOR SURE, but it wasn't there by the end of the book.

Second, it was kind of cluttered. We got to see a LOT of povs, and while some of them were fun, a lot felt unnecessary for this particular story. I hope they will tie up with the next installment (we have yet to solve the Dad problem and hear about the mom, so I've got high hopes for that bearing fruit) but even so it felt a bit much.

I kind of want Mackenzie to get a book now.

thebookdisciple

Written on May 5, 2018

Hot and Badgered was adorable! I simply loved this story. It was funny, sweet, and zany! I loved the relationship between the sisters. Charlie, Stevie, and Max have the most amazing relationship. They all share a father, but have 3 different mothers. Max is a full honey badger, Charlie is a wolf/honey badger hybrid, and Stevie is a tiger/honey badger hybrid. They love each other more than anything, and their entire lives have been devoted to saving each other from their horrible father's scams!

Berg and his siblings, Britta and Dag, have a similar sibling relationships (except without the crazy father!). So naturally, Berg falls for Charlie right away. The plot is filled with various dangers, a wedding, crazy family, and bears. Added to the Dunn siblings and the MacKilligan sisters, you have the crazy Smith wolf pack, Dutch, the wolverine, and a neighborhood of hilarious bear shifters!

Hot and Badgered quickly became of my favorite reads of this year. How have I never read anything by Laurenston!? I cannot wait to get more of this series.

Traci Odom narrated the story beautifully! Her accents for the various characters were delightful and I enjoyed her narration immensely!

POV: 3rd

Tears: no

Trope: shifters, family drama

Triggers: none

Series/Standalone: stand alone

Cliffhanger: no

HEA: yes with epilogue

How to Tame a Beast in 7 days by Kerrelyn Sparks, Baby I'm Howling for You by Christine Warren, books by Eve Langlais...then you will probably like Hot and Badgered!

Hot and Badgered

See full review on The Book Disciple

EBookObsessed

Written on May 3, 2018

Hot and Badgered might be the first book in a story arc but it is all part of the same shifter world created by Shelly Laurenston so be ready to spend time with some old friends…and enemies.

In Hot and Badgered we meet three half-sisters, Charlie, Max and Stevie, three daughters of a honey badger named Freddy “the fuck up” MacKilligan. Their father is a major screw up and a thief, but not even a good thief. Whatever he steals, he loses. Which only makes things worse for Charlie, Max and Stevie, because whoever Freddy’s screws over usually tries to take it out on his daughters. Or, let’s not forget the time he sold his youngest daughter Stevie, the prodigy, to a Columbian drug lord to make designer meth for him. Freddy is all about stealing a buck and doesn’t worry about the destruction (or the daughters) he leaves behind.

When Freddy steals over a million pounds sterling from his own, not very legal, businessman brother, it once again puts the girls running from another group of hired mercenies. Well, really they only run as far as they need to in order to get those thugs into their own trap. The MacKilligans are honey badgers. Not only are honey badgers hard to kill, but after years of dealing with their father’s B.S., they know how to get real mean.

But this last screw up also put Charlie in the path of one sweet grizzly bear, who is more of a teddy bear, and no matter how much Charlie protests that Berg doesn’t want to get involved in the MacKilligan curse, she simply can’t shoo him away. And she is starting to realize, she just doesn’t want to.

In a series full of different types of wolves, lions, tigers, bears, jackels, and wolverines, it is the honey badger that everyone fears. They are the most vicious and the hardest to kill. Charles even takes on Dee Ann Smith and comes out on top!

I find in this series that the more antisocial the character, the more I love them. Livy from Bite Me and Bo Novikov from Beast Behaving Badly are at the top of my list. They are just outragous which makes it so funny.

But I have to admit, as much as I enjoy Shelly Laurenston’s (and alter ego G.G. Aiken) stories while I am reading them, I don’t feel the need to play catch up on the books that I missed or feel the desire to do a series re-read. They are fun stories, but they never call to me to come back again even on my favorite characters.

Received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

See more at EBookObsessed.com

Melanie

Written on Mar 30, 2018

My review and an extended sample of the audiobook are posted at Hotlistens.com.

In this first of a spin-off series from Shelly Laurenston’s Pride series, we follow three half-sisters as they try to survive. The MacKilligan sisters have had a rough past which has left them with a few issues. Add to that they are all at least half honey badger, they have some interesting personality traits.

We start off this series with a prologue about the sisters as they are very young. Charlie, the oldest of the sisters and half-wolf, her mother took in the other two kids of her ex. Max is a full honey badger and the middle sister. Stevie is the youngest and half tiger. When Charlie’s mom dies, she gets her sisters to her mother’s pack in Wisconsin and her grandfather raised them until they were adults and then encouraged to leave the pack.

Charlie has spent her whole life caring for her sisters. She is the glue that holds them together. Max is a psychopath and will blow up at people and likely kill them. Stevie is a genius in both science and music. She also has a lot of anxiety and spends a lot of time in mental institutions for the rich.

When the MacKilligan are again on someone’s hit list because of something stupid their father did, Charlie has to gather her sisters and get them to safety. She takes them to a place outside of New York City. They end up in a safe house in a bear neighborhood across the street from the hero of the story, Berg Dunn.

So Charlie has to find out how to get the assassins off their tail. While she has to do that, she is also roped into making sure one of her cousins go through with her wedding to a very rich human who doesn’t know that he’s marrying into a crazy honey badger family.

So Berg, his brother and sister, they’re triplets, are just sweet cuddly teddy bears. I really liked all three of them. I just really love how she writes bears. They are so cute and their obsession with honey is great too (though, nothing will ever top Locke playing with his toes).

The MacKilligan sisters are crazy, but funny and a lot of fun. I can’t wait to hear more of their story.

A big highlight is that you have many characters from the Pride series. Dee-Anne Smith, Kyle Jean-Louis Parker, Blayne Thorpe, Ulrich “Ric” Van Holtz and Marcella “Cella” “Bare Knuckles” Malone, and last but not least, Bo Novikov all make appearances. There are more too. I’m hoping that Shin, the panda shifter we met in the last Pride book, who also makes an appearance in this one, will get his own book in this series. I love Shin.

This series is all about the humor and crazy characters. The romance isn’t the focus of the story, it is mostly about the crazy family while the sisters look to find the assassins. I love everything about it. So much fun. I was laughing so much. If I had read this book, instead of listening, I would’ve had so many quotes highlighted to include, but it is so hard to do with audiobooks.

Narration
I had been hoping that Johanna Parker, the narrator for the Pride series, would narrate this series, but I was excited to see that Traci Odom is the narrator. She is another narrator who I love. I thought she did a great job with all the characters in this series, and there are a lot. There are a few differences between her voices for some of the Pride characters, but the differences aren’t extreme and the new voices aren’t bad, just a little different. I loved her male and female voices. If you haven’t tried Traci, I highly recommend her. She does a great job with all of her narrations.

**I like to thank the publisher for providing me with a copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

stacey_is_sassy

Written on Mar 29, 2018

They’re all crazy...in a psychotic but funny way.

When I received my approval for an ARC of Hot and Badgered I did a wee bit of a shake and shimmy happy dance. After a stressful few days in real life, reading this story was like a breath of fresh air. I laughed, smirked, squirmed and sighed throughout the whole story. I also did one of those silent laughs that ends in a snort trying to be quiet because it was 4:00 in the morning and hubby was asleep beside me. Yeah, yeah, I should have been asleep but hubby snored for a couple of seconds, woke me up, and of course, I had to read myself back to sleep (good excuse).

Anyone who has read and loved Shelly Laurenston’s Pride or Magnus Pack series will love Hot and Badgered. This author's characters are extremely loyal to their family, protective of those they love…and have no hesitation to murder you in your sleep if you do them wrong. Turns out Honey Badgers are that to the EXTREME!

There’s something about these stories that suck you in. Most of the characters are goofy with a side of psychotic that just makes them so endearing. When we meet Charlie and her sisters Max and Stevie they’re kids and even from their tender young age, we come to realise that they are a wee bit more psychotic than goofy. But geez, it’s no bloody wonder. Their dad is a douchewaffle of EPIC proportions. He’s so bad I wanted to jump into the pages to hold the idiot down for Max to do her thing with knives…and I would have been grinning right beside her.

I think Shelly Laurenston is brilliant. I’m not sure another author could pull off her skills of maximum confusion. See, when you start her books they tend to jump around a lot. You’re looking at one character and seeing their world one minute and the next someone completely different. Now, this different character may seem completely unrelated to the current story, but you just KNOW they’ll be back.

Where the brilliance comes in, is that, this confusion is a little like the characters and the storyline. We become honey badgers who bake one minute and pull a knife out of a leg holster and throw it, the next. Picture it like you’re in a control room with six monitors going. You slide your eyes over each screen hoping to keep abreast of all that’s going on. It’s quick and if you blink, you miss it and I didn’t want to miss a thing. The little jumps have a purpose and when it all comes together, you're glad you had the opportunity to build the puzzle yourself. I find that Shelly's stories are fast-paced, keep my head spinning and my heart thumping.

The love story is a bit of a slow burn. Charlie, as the oldest sister, feels a lot of responsibility in keeping her sisters alive and well. She doesn’t have time for romance and doesn’t want to drag a good man into the family curse…named, Freddy MacKilligan AKA, Dad. Funnily enough, the one man/shifter who wants to get dragged in, completely understands her and her family dynamics. His family is just as crazy.

Berg Dunn is a triplet and his life changed forever when a naked woman fell into his world. Berg is a bear shifter who works in security with his brother and sister. They work together and live together so he understands all about family loyalty. They get mistaken for each other (even the sister) A LOT, have each other's back and would die to protect one another. Just like the MacKillagan sisters.

I loved Berg. He comes across as kind of dopey in a sleepy bear coming out of hibernation way. But, there’s this other side to him too. This side of Berg is kind of scary and intense. One minute he's calm, next minute the cranky bear comes out and if you're in his way, he could pop you like a pimple.

You never know what’s around the corner for Charlie, Max and Stevie (boys names because the douchewaffle wanted boys and got girls). I will tell you one thing that I loved about each of them. Charlie bakes to relieve stress, Max smiles as she kills, and Stevie forgets people she’s just met because she doesn’t want to waste brain space on insignificant people…her brain is too important. There's plenty more I could mention but I limited myself to one each. They’re quirky, tough and kick butt. I loved them.

Hot and Badgered was a fun read with plenty of action, suspense and adventure. I would call it a slow burn as Charlie’s crazy life gives them plenty of time to get to know each other before we get to the fun stuff (wink, wink). And, boy was it FUN. Berg starts slow and intense but when his bear kicks in, it's hard and fast and oh so FUN! It’s also not a short story but I never found a time that it dragged or made me want to hurry things up.

I really enjoyed Hot and Badgered and I know this is the start of a new favourite series.

Stacey is Sassy, received a complimentary copy of this story. The copy provided is not the final copy and may be subject to edits and changes.

chymerra

Written on Nov 15, 2017

This review is going to be super short because I accidentally asked for (and got) a sneak peek of Hot and Badgered. I got the first chapter and what a first chapter it was!! I was hooked and super disappointed when it ended. I need to know more about Berg and Charlie. I need to know where their romance is going. I also need to know why Charlie’s father is trying to kill her. I also need to find out how a honey badger shifter and a grizzly bear shifter romance is going to turn out.

So, guess I am going to go get the book when it’s published. Unless I get the full ARC.

I would like to thank Shelly Laurenston, Kensington Books, Kensington and NetGalley for allowing me the privilege of reading this chapter excerpt of Hot and Badgered.

All opinions stated in this review of Hot and Badgered are mine

**I chose to leave this review after reading an advance reader copy**