Charlotte Kersten

Year published: 2016

Category: urban fantasy

Representation: M/M, main couple and side couples/characters

Summary: Ox was twelve when his daddy taught him a very valuable lesson. He said that Ox wasn’t worth anything and people would never understand him. Then he left.
Ox was sixteen when he met the boy on the road, the boy who talked and talked and talked. Ox found out later the boy hadn’t spoken in almost two years before that day, and that the boy belonged to a family who had moved into the house at the end of the lane.
Ox was seventeen when he found out the boy’s secret, and it painted the world around him in colors of red and orange and violet, of Alpha and Beta and Omega.
Ox was twenty-three when murder came to town and tore a hole in his head and heart. The boy chased after the monster with revenge in his bloodred eyes, leaving Ox behind to pick up the pieces.
It’s been three years since that fateful day—and the boy is back. Except now he’s a man, and Ox can no longer ignore the song that howls between them.

My thoughts: I’ve seen TJ Klune’s books get more and more popular and beloved over the years. He’s the king of feel-good found family queer fantasy, so I’m shocked by how much I ended up disliking this book.

When I posted an early update saying “Hey, this is kind of ??” most people immediately piped up that the relationship between Ox and Joe was just too weird and icky for them to enjoy the book. There’s a six year age gap between the two and Joe imprints on Ox almost as soon as he meets him at age ten; from then on, they have a deeply codependent wolf soul bond and are basically destined to be mates. This is already pretty Breaking Dawn in the worst of ways, but it gets really strange when Joe is seventeen and Ox is twenty-three because this is when Ox realizes that he’s attracted to Joe. Joe realizes it too, and let me tell you that I SUFFERED during the bits where Joe is trying to seduce him by eating bananas and licking cream. It’s just…definitely a choice.

Beyond that (oh no, there’s a beyond that), the relationship when they’re both adults is full of enough scenting arousal and territorial growling to rival a Sarah J Maas book, as well as Joe saying things like “I want to claim you and make you bleed” like we’re supposed to take it seriously. There’s also so, so much angst when he makes the decision to leave and hunt down the villain, and it truly feels like the second half of the book is comprised almost entirely of Ox being mad at Joe and the pack members who followed him and everyone talking about that in various conversational formations over and over again. It got very repetitive.

I feel like it’s fairly common knowledge at this point that all the science around alpha wolves has been disproven, but it definitely still lives on in a lot of spec fic, including this book. What I think is strange in this case is that Ox is constantly repeating how his dad told him that men don’t cry and then he overcomes that toxic expectation that he’s internalized and forms meaningful bonds with other men, but the rest of the book takes the idea of the Alpha Male completely at face value with all of the hyper-strength, aggression and authority that comes with that trope completely uninterrogated.

And although I know that the entire point of this book is the development of a super strong found family, I can’t say that it ever really hit home for me. Ox does form really deep bonds with other men, yes, but their interactions mostly consist of them fake-arguing and exchanging insults or real-arguing and exchanging insults. The three men from Gordo’s garage, whose names I can’t remember because they’re indistinguishable except for the Latino one who calls everyone papi, and the Bennett brothers Kelly and Carter really do not stand out as characters on their own and primarily feel like vehicles for the delivery of the book’s witty banter. As for the female characters, Ox’s mom is brutally murdered, Elizabeth mostly cooks, caretakes everyone’s emotions and mourns her husband, and Jessie exists to be jealous of Joe, tell Ox how clear their bond is, and then get kidnapped so Ox can step into his role as the Alpha.

Finally, I really did not care for the writing. There is an overuse of italics that I couldn’t stop noticing once I started, and Klune repeats the same few key phrases over and over again to excess for a few characters: Ox’s mom and the soap bubble on his ear, Ox’s dad and the fact that Ox is gonna get shit and men don’t cry, and Joe and the fact that Ox smells like “pinecones and candy canes and epic and awesome.” To conclude: really, really not for me, and I will not be continuing the series. Awoo.