Fateful is a great mixture of romance and action.

The story is diary based, and is written from the point of view of a servant-maid, named Tess Davies. Tess works for Irene, the daughter of an English aristocracy family. They're all aboard the Titanic. While Irene stays in the luxury of first class, Tess is forced to share a 3rd class cabin with 3 other people.

Not long after boarding, Tess meets a handsome and wealthy young man, Alec Marlowe, and it’s not long before they fall in love with each other. Unfortunately, Alec is being stalked by a very dangerous Russian gentleman, Mikhail, and they both share a secret; Mikhail and Alec are both werewolves.

Mikhail plans to kill Alec and Tess as well as steal from Irene's family treasures,  a very special item that may put Alec in deep danger.

Before they land in New York, the Titanic heads into great danger.

I quite liked the twists in the story, and I also liked the descriptions of the Titanic, especially how the 3rd class cabins looked and felt, and the 1st class dining rooms. (It was so cool.)

Tess and Alec were two very well written characters, especially Tess. She is brave, polite, independent, but at times quite useless.

The book was well written, and describes in great detail what it would have been like to be a maid on the Titanic.

I recommend the book to mainly girls 12+ as this story is written for more secondary-school students, as there are a few violent parts, some romance and quite a bit of swearing.

Werewolves on the Titanic…it’s hard to think of a more interesting way to rehash an old romantic story, and Claudia Gray has certainly come to the party with this one.

Fateful is a classic boy meets girl story, and for those that loved the movie The Titanic (DiCaprio and Winslet) this will bring back all sorts of pleasant flashbacks. The comparisons to the movie are unavoidable. It’s a romance, between classes, on a boat that we all know sinks. This gives us few options to play with really, either one dies, they both die or they both survive, but we know for a fact that one of these three options HAS to occur. In most books the survival of the characters isn’t really an issue.

So we have Tess, a young maid to a stereotypically horrible family, which has money problems they’re trying to hide while finding a suitable marriage for the daughter. And we have Alec, handsome only son of an American steel magnate; and werewolf under the control of a rather nasty secret society of werewolves set on taking over the world.

The story itself flows well, with interesting twists and good pacing, but knowing that we’re leading up to the sinking makes it predictable, as the reader tries to work out the timing and place events in order to fit to the inevitable.

The characters are quite believable, but the werewolf aspect does provide a great new dimension to otherwise expected character development.

Basically, Fateful is a nice light read; it’s nothing overly original, but it does tell a story well, and is a great first book in what, I’m assuming, will become a rather interesting series.