Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Ghost (Wolf's-own) by Carole Cummings
Rating: Loved (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Usually YA books take me about 4 hours to read. Adult books take me 6-8 hours. When my Kindle told me this book would take me 32 hours I almost fell out of my chair. Turns out this isn't a book, but an omnibus. Three books and two novellas. WHEW. Each book is marked as a chapter, which at least makes it easy to know where one book ends and the next begins.

Wolf's-own is a fantasy series with a M/M romance in it. While the world/worldbuilding is interesting enough, it's the characters that make the story.

The story focuses on two main characters, one Fen (AKA Ghost, AKA Jacin-rei) and one Malick. Fen is Untouchable -- Ancestor spirits speak through him. Understandably, this tends to drive the Untouchables insane. Malick is something that would be spoilery to explain, but even without that, he's such an interesting character. The two of them together are explosive, in generally the worst ways but sometimes the best ways.

The only thing I initially disliked was that it used multiple third person POVs. I like one best, though I can usually get into two, but in the case of this book, POV jumped to whichever character would best progress the story. Which makes sense, but tended to slightly disconnect me.

If I had only the first book, I might be somewhat unhappy with the ending. It did not end on a cliffhanger, but it sure did leave a whole lot of threads unresolved. Luckily I was able to start the next book with nothing more than a slight flick of my finger.

This book did something I generally dislike: It included a glossary. I only skimmed it at the beginning, and by the end wish I had had read it more closely. Ebooks (or at least my Kindle) make it hard to go back and read something earlier without losing your place, so I never turned back to it, which left me trying to remember what the various [made up named thing]s were.

Hm, rereading this review, that sure does sound like I had a lot of complaints, huh? But I really did love it. The characters were so interesting, the story kept zipping right along, and while there was a relationship in the story, it never got close to being a romance book.