My Initial Reaction...
Happily Never After was a fun, quick read that gave me a bit of the Night Huntress world, without focusing at all on Cat and Bones. I enjoyed it and hope I get to see some of these characters more!
The Good...
I really loved the characters in Happily Never After. They're decently well developed for a short and have fun personalities. Greta was my favorite character - she's Isabella's grandmother and an OLD friend of Bones. She calls on him for some help for her grandchildren and gets everything set in motion. She's spunky and still got a lot of life in her.
Isabella was also a solid character - she clearly isn't a weakling - she's playing with the mob and even though she's scared, she's holding her own. And Chance is a vampire very like Bones - not vicious, protector of the innocent, etc. I would really like to see more of him in future Night Huntress books. I really hope these stories overlap with the main story line at some point.
The Bad...
This got dangerously close to insta-love for me. I think Jeaniene got around it by having Isabella be hesitant around Chance at first and Chance just being more enlightened about what he's feeling because he's lived so long. But it still felt insta-lovey. Thankfully they weren't actually promising themselves to each other or anything by the end, so maybe it's just insta-lust with lots of hinting at love. The lust was pretty nice though ;)
I also found the conflict a bit lacking. The mob boss we're dealing with is a joke - not just to Chance, but to other mobsters. I suppose it might have been meant to make the story humorous, but I just felt like it made them a non-obstacle. So I was never anxious or worried.
Concluding Sentiments...
Although not an amazing short story, Happily Never After was a lot of fun to read and introduced some characters I really hope to see more of in the Night Huntress books. And it has me itching to get back to the novels now, so I guess it also did it's job!
This book may be unsuitable for people under 17 years of age due to its use of sexual content, drug and alcohol use, and/or violence.