A Canadian Werewolf In New York by Mark Leslie is a light paranormal story focused on how the extraordinary affects the ordinary life.

     As concepts go, the driving concept behind A Canadian Werewolf had potential but I personally found the execution a bit underwhelming. The problems that being a supernatural werewolf caused were more along the lines of inconvenient, and for the opening segment awkwardly humorous, as opposed to interesting or compelling. Some of this is compounded by the author diluting some of the conflicts; our main character is a successful author, which is a significantly easier job to balance with being a werewolf as opposed to living paycheck to paycheck on a standard 9 to 5. The concept also functions more as a background theme rather than the focus, with most of the story revolving around a light action/adventure style rescue plot with a lost-love subplot. The end result for me was just a bit muddled, lacking sufficient paranormal elements, comedy, or more slice of live/concept exploration to really serve as any of those genres.

     The general plotting and prose are fine, but nothing exciting, and there’s not much character work occurring. Our primary character doesn’t change, or overcome any significant challenge; the majority of his character story, and this is my heaviest grievance with the book, is lamenting his lost love and all together too much of the book is devoted to his adoration of and mooning over her. It is one of those elements of the book where the concept would have been better served placing the reader directly in the conflict; the love was lost due to the MC being a werewolf, which means all the drama, fear, and conflict of trying to conceal himself being a werewolf from the love of his life is lost and replaced with the drama of her being engaged to another man.

     To close, a Canadian Werewolf in New York is a paranormal story where none of its various plot elements and concepts really complement one another. The result is a fine, just unexciting.