It took me the first quarter of the book to realise that Such Sharp Teeth wasn’t going to be anything like the story I had thought I was going to read.

I’d anticipated a snarky, upbeat, witty tale of a successful twenty-something woman who has escaped her home town and made an independent life for herself in the big city reacting with wit and attitude to discovering that, as a result of being attacked on her one visit to her home town, her life has been blown up because she’s become a werewolf. I thought there’d be trope-twisting and inside jokes about other Urban Fantasy stories and that our heroine would sail through it all, snapping out one-liners as she went. Maybe someone should write that book. It would be fun, light and forgettable.

The book that Rachel Harrison has written refuses to rehash old tropes. Instead, it uses Rory’s transformation into a werewolf as a means to explore her life: who she’s been, who she wants to be and who she’s going to be able to be now that she changes into a wolf at every full moon. It’s original and thoughtful and it feels real. Yes, there’s a lot of humour in there. Humour is part of how Rory deals with the world, but the predominant emotion is rage at all the things in her life that are not fair, an aching desire to be loved for who she is and strong belief, based on years of experience, that that’s not going to happen, except maybe with her twin sister, Scarlet, who loves her even when she doesn’t like her very much.

For the most part, Rory has to deal with becoming a werewolf on her own. She slowly starts to work out what has happened to her and to understand some of the physical changes: her sense of smell, her improved hearing, her insatiable hunger for meat, her ability to heal and her superhuman strength. It takes her much longer to accept that all of this really has happened to her, that she can’t cure it or change it, only find a way to live with it, live with being a monster. It takes her longer still to understand that, in many ways, she is still who she has always been, that her wolf may see red and wreak violence but that the rage that drives her has been there since her childhood. Eventually, she starts to focus not on what she’s lost but on who she now wants to become.

I loved that Rory’s transformation is mirrored by her twin sister’s experience of being pregnant. Scarlet’s life has also been blown up and forever changed by an unexpected event. She’s lost control of her emotions and her body is changing and will never again be as it was and she has no idea whether she can cope with what comes next. Scarlet’s rage at how pregnant women are treated, by the pressures that are put on them and the indignities that they are expected to accept without complaint gave me another view of what was happening to Rory and it made Rory’s transformation much more human.

All the werewolf parts of this book work but they’re not the parts of the book that most engaged me. Reading Such Sharp Teeth made me realise that most werewolf books read like the person who has been bitten has joined a cult. Their old identity is over and their new identity is centred entirely around the pack that they’re now a part of. This doesn’t happen to Rory. Rather than severing the links with her past, she finds herself building on them as she reconnects with her sister and her best friend and with Ian who, in High School, had an unrequited crush on her. One of the things that made me smile was that Rory was more stressed out by having to spend time with her mother than she was by having to come to terms with being a werewolf. Still, when I met her mother and learned their history, Rory’s reaction made a lot of sense. Watching how Rory and Scarlet deal with their respective involuntary transformations and deal with their mother coming to stay, was one of the things that grounded this book and made me care about the people in it.

I also enjoyed Rory’s relationship with Ian. This wasn’t a RomCom trope. There was no InstaLove. This was the story of a man who had always been in love with a woman he was sure would always be beyond his reach and a woman who had always avoided relationships in favour of casual hookups and who now finds herself smitten by a man who makes her feel calm and anchored and loved. Yes, all the usual romance obstacles were there but they were overcome mostly by the people being themselves rather than by any plot twists.

Such Sharp Teeth got under my skin in ways that I hadn’t expected. I believed in Rory and liked her. Beneath the caustic, too-cool-for-a-small-town facade was a woman who had been hurt, who lived with rage but who wanted, somehow, to arrive at happiness. I believed in the relationship between Rory and Scarlet. The dialogue between them and the way they treated one another was intimate without being sloppy or artificially comic. I liked that there were no shortcuts that could magically fix the relationship between the sisters and their mother but there was no way of removing the mutual love from it either.

I ended the book thinking about the nature of the transformation that Rory had been through. Becoming a werewolf didn’t unleash her inner beast and turn her into a monster. Instead it gave her a way of dealing with her rage at how she had been treated. For the first time in her life, she felt safe. No one could hurt her. Like most women, she’d grown up accepting being in danger from men as a fact of life. She wasn’t in danger any more. She was the danger now. The question in front of her was what was she going to do with that strength and whether or not could or would control her rage. When you have such sharp teeth, you need to think carefully about who you bite.