Two Halves, One Brian

Book Stats

• Book 1 of the Cruel Shifterverse series
• Format: ebook
• Chapters: 27
• Pages: 280
• POV: 1st person, mostly from Sadie’s POV. Sometimes from the POV of the other alphas

Book Rating

Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️/ 5

Summary & Review

Jasmine Mas is the queen of self-deprecating humor. Seriously. I always end up chuckling to myself when I read her work.

The first book in the Cruel Shifterverse series follow Sadie’s journey from abused servant to badass alpha with a harem of obsessive alpha men. There’s a lot of spice and dirty thoughts, so be warned. But the story is also fun and well done, in my opinion. So it’s a pretty well-rounded story.

The journey starts in the shifter realm, which is cold and miserable. This realm has 2 classifications of people – ABOs and Null Shifters. Null shifters make up 99% of the population and they have no abilities or immortality. Most Nulls get tested at the sacred lake when they turn 20 to discover if they are an ABO.

ABOs are the Alphas, Betas, and Omegas and they make up only 1% of the population. Betas are the most common and are the realm’s soldiers. They’re stronger and faster than nulls and live longer, but can’t shift. Alphas are huge and immortal and are able to shift into some unique beast. Omegas are the most revered and are also immortal. They shift into harmless, small creatures and alphas are obsessed with them.

In this realm, alphas are dying out because omegas are the only shifters who can birth ABOs and there are none left in the realm.

Sadie and her sister, Lucinda, were orphaned at a tavern as kids. That made them the property of the tavern owner, Dick, who was a beta and an abusive jerk toward Sadie. He regularly whipped her with his belt, leaving horrible scars along her chest, back, and arms. She screamed until her voice became permanently hoarse and broken.

At 20, Sadie was taken to the sacred lake by a mysterious cloaked person and her blood was tested. She was proven to be an alpha, though she was small and had no abilities she was aware of. Not to mention, there were no female alphas. Or at least, there weren’t.

The cloaked stranger took Sadie to one of the portal compounds, where alphas and betas train and protect the realm from the fae who use portals to come into the shifter realm. This is where she first meets the other alphas who reside at the compound.

Ascher is 21 years old and newly tested as an alpha. He is covered in tattoos (everywhere) with shaggy gold hair, and smells like pine trees. He is a ram shifter, with black horns jutting from his head. When he shifts, he grows taller, as do his horns, and his torso expands and bulks up, while his legs are covered in fur and end in hooves.

Cobra is 100 years old. He’s the most beautiful man anyone has ever seen, with pale skin, inky black hair, emerald eyes, and hundreds of jewels embedded in his skin. He smells frosty. He’s a snake shifter, though the only thing that physically transforms are his eyes. Other than that, he remains a man but can control hundreds of shadow snakes, or combine them into one giant shadow snake.

Jax is 120 years old. He has dark skin, long braids hung to his biceps with hundreds of gold trinkets dangling from them, and piercings everywhere. Yes, EVERYWHERE. He smells like warm chestnuts. He’s like 7 feet tall as a male. He’s also a bear shifter, who is almost twice that height as a bear. So, like a 14 foot tall bear.

Basically all together, they smell like a delightful Christmas – pine trees, warm chestnuts, and frost. To tie it all together even more, we later learn that Sadie smells like sweet cranberries. I guess I could also provide a description of Sadie. She’s tiny with golden skin, blood red eyes, and long straight white hair.

Anyway, there’s a lot of training and fighting. The alpha men all refuse to believe Sadie is an alpha until she shifts for the first time – into a saber-toothed tiger! Which is pretty badass. When she’s out of her shifted form, though, she’s kind of pathetic. Weak, unable to run to save her life, and a little (okay, a lot) mentally unwell. But she has this unique ability to flip on “the numb”, which removes her feelings and pain and allows her to fight and handle just about anything. The downside? Once she’s done using it, she gets sick and the numb needs time to recharge, so she can’t just use it all the time.

At this compound, we also get to meet Aran, a recently discovered beta male. He and Sadie become BFFs pretty much immediately. They have similar humor and attitudes, so they’re just a really good time.

At the end of the first book, we see an epic display of betrayal. Then the alphas and Aran all end up in the fae realm.

Favorite Quotes

• “I was about five and a half feet tall. In contrast, they were built like they ate fifteen meals a day and lifted rocks for fun. It was kind of embarrassing for them. They looked like they tried way too hard and had exercise addictions. Not cute.”
• ”Alphas were big beasts, and I was a little bitch—physically, not emotionally. Obviously.”
• ”’Look good, feel good,’ I had heard a woman at the bar say before. ‘Look like shit, feel like bigger shit,’ I said to the mirror and gave myself a thumbs-up.”
• ”New life motto: anyone who bullied me was getting shanked. Hard.”