REVIEW: ‘Cry Wolf (Alpha & Omega Series)’ by Patricia Briggs

Keis­hon,

I under­stand what you mean about the pos­ses­sive­ness, even though I didn’t feel that way — we all have our hot but­tons. Re. what Jane said, I may have been infer­ring too much; I think in her review of On the Prowl, she said that she felt that Anna was able to phys­i­cally respond to Charles in too short a time. I can under­stand that view­point, even though it didn’t bother me.

Re. Anna’s emo­tional bag­gage, I don’t want it to drag out either, but I liked the way Briggs paced it in Cry Wolf. If Anna kept going through the same issues over and over again, it would get repet­i­tive and frus­trat­ing, but at the same time, I think that char­ac­ters with­out any emo­tional issues don’t bear much resem­blance to real human beings (I have yet to meet a per­son who didn’t have some mixed up feel­ings about some­thing). I think the chal­lenge of a series that fol­lows the same char­ac­ter can be how to keep that char­ac­ter both con­sis­tent (true to that character’s per­son­al­ity) and con­sis­tently inter­est­ing to read­ers. Briggs is such a good writer, I think she is up to the task and I’m really look­ing for­ward to the next book.

Re. the wolf self thing — you are mak­ing a lot of sense. It didn’t have the same effect on me, but I do see what you mean about want­ing more subltety.

And BTW, I think your reviews make for very good read­ing, and stat­ing why you like or don’t like a book is all that a review needs to do. There are always going to be dif­fer­ences of opin­ion because dif­fer­ent read­ers respond dif­fer­ently to the same books — it doesn’t mean your opin­ion is off the wall.

I enjoyed your review with Briggs too and I liked her answer about the books being part­way between parnor­mal romance and urban fan­tasy. That was how I saw Cry Wolf, too, though the “Alpha and Omega” novella was so romance and relationship-focused that it was basi­cally a romance novella to me.

B
I
G

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

I don’t know if Briggs will do this in future books but I really enjoyed the love scene in this one and I would enjoy see­ing more, esp. since in ry Wolf, Anna called on her wolf to make love with Charles, and I’d kind of like to see her make love with him while her wolf is rest­ing. It would show pro­gres­sion in the rela­tion­ship, but I don’t know if Briggs will want to go there. I would love it if she did, but I’ll keep read­ing even if she doesn’t.

Reply

Great review, Keis­hon! I’m dying to dis­cuss this book so I hope you don’t mind if I give my reac­tions to it and to some of the points in your review.

I thought Charles’s pos­ses­sive­ness was a bit much but some read­ers may enjoy that more than me.

I often find pos­ses­sive heroes annoy­ing, but in this case, I actu­ally enjoyed the pos­ses­sive­ness because Charles wasn’t com­fort­able with his own pos­ses­sive­ness. Part of it was him but a big­ger part of it was his wolf, and Charles fought the wolf part of him­self in order to give Anna the space she needed. I felt there was some­thing noble in that, in the way he had to sup­press his own impulses but was will­ing to do that for Anna because she meant so much to him. It was very roman­tic to me (not the pos­ses­sive­ness, but the strug­gle to be good to her).

Another thing is the refer­ral of their “wolf” as a sep­a­rate entity — can’t say that I liked that much and I thought it was odd.

I liked that a lot. I thought it was con­sis­tent with the story “Alpha and Omega,” where Charles referred to his wolf self as “Brother wolf.” There were times in that story when “brother wolf” had a dif­fer­nent instinct or POV than Charles did. In the begin­ning, the wolf wanted her for his mate before Charles did. And later there was a great moment when Charles almost said some­thing that might have hurt Anna’s feel­ings, but the wolf stopped him from doing so.

In Cry Wolf, this was expanded on — I espe­cially liked the scene in which Charles thought (I’m para­phras­ing from mem­ory here) that he couldn’t remem­ber a time when he hadn’t been aware of the fact that there were two souls that occu­pied his body. We were also shown more of how much this was the case for Anna, with the way she was able to call on her wolf half to give her strength.

I think there is a lot that Briggs can do with explor­ing this in future books, esp. the dif­fer­ence between some­one like Charles, who is used to shar­ing his body with another soul (the wolf’s) from birth, and some­one like Anna, who is less used to it and who had it forced on her. As I said in my DA review I think that maybe part of the arc of the series will be about Anna’s hav­ing to accept that aspect of her­self and of the man she loves — that they are mon­sters, and killers, no mat­ter how human they also are at the same time.

Lastly, I thought Anna’s char­ac­ter had regressed a bit from the novella. My hope is that we don’t spend too many books build­ing her self-esteem back up. Given this fresh start, I feel that Anna has began to heal.

I can see why you might feel that Anna had regressed from “Alpha and Omega,” espe­cially since she starts Cry Wolf feel­ing afraid. It is inter­est­ing to com­pare your reac­tion with Jane’s reac­tion to “Alpha and Omega,” where Jane felt that Anna got over her sex­ual issues too quickly. In Cry Wolf we saw that this was not entirely the case.

My reac­tion was some­where in the mid­dle — I feel that the regres­sion is very real­is­tic, since Anna had only known Charles one day, and he was wounded, and her entire life had been changed and she was uprooted from her home. I’m very glad that Briggs put some real obsta­cles in Anna and Charles’ rela­tion­ship, esp. with Anna’s inti­macy issues, since I think the kind of trauma Anna suf­fered isn’t some­thing that peo­ple get over very quickly.

Often­times I do think that books gloss over the recov­ery process for rape sur­vivors and have the hero­ine get over that kind of trauma in one love scene. That rarely feels real­is­tic to me. Which is why I actu­ally hope that Briggs con­tin­ues to show the recov­ery as a grad­ual process that can some­times be two steps for­ward, one step back, as she has done Cry Wolf.

I am very glad that Anna and Charles are com­mit­ted to each other but I hope that doesn’t mean the end of their issues because for me, their rela­tion­ship is what I love about these books and once the rela­tion­ship issues are all resolved, I don’t know if I’ll be equally inter­ested. Of course, there’s a fine line between resolv­ing them too quickly and drag­ging them out too long, so I hope that Briggs finds that balance.

Reply