Tumperkin – I see what you are saying, but I feel that given that Anna was raped by her pack members on multiple occasions, the kind of delight in each other’s bodies that people take when they are falling in love would be very difficult to pull off in a story like “Alpha and Omega.” I expect it will happen eventually, when Anna is finally able to make love to Charles with her consciousness in place, something that they begin to work on in Hunting Ground.

I thought the one kiss that they shared in “Alpha and Omega” when Charles prowls around Anna and says “I promise you will enjoy sex with me,” was sooooo sexy, more so than a lot of love scenes in other books. So I think when he delivers on that promise, we will get that, but until then, sex=danger for Anna, and while she has to bring in the wolf to cope with that, it just wouldn’t fit the story to have them delight in each other’s physicality. And I am really glad Briggs is taking her time with that.

What I loved about “Alpha and Omega” perhaps most of all was the way it captured the stomach-dropping aspect of falling in love. The way it’s a real roller coaster ride, that you just don’t know from one moment to the next, one day to the next, how you will feel and what you will experience. The way your mind is suddenly and completely taken over by thoughts of someone who just a few days ago you didn’t know existed. And I think how scary that is.

Falling in love, for me, is a lot about a conflict between fear and desire. Some of my favorite romances, books like Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold or Kinsale’s The Shadow and the Star, capture that scary aspect so well, the reason we call it falling in love. The way it feels like a freefall. But most romances completely neglect it, and for me, that’s a big thing to miss, probably as much as the physical aspect is for you. Briggs remembers how out of their depths people feel when they are in love. I think that’s a big part of why I find this series so powerfully romantic.

Re. Briggs’ writing style. I actually quite like it. I think her matter-of-fact delivery helps to ground the fantastical elements of the story in realism, so that my experiences of the fantasy feels authentic, unlike in something like Ward’s BDB books where everything feels over the top, like the reading equivalent of a videogame. When I read Briggs I feel like these people could exist in my world — that along with everyday life details like Anna’s empty refrigerator and Charles’ first aid kit with the pink bandages, Briggs’ simple writing style makes me believe in the characters’ ability to turn into wolves.

Sometimes the simplicity of her writing delivers a real gut punch, too, like in some of the sections that I quoted from in my DA review. Even though I often love more lush writing styles, I feel that the spareness and clarity of Briggs’ writing serves these stories really well.

Re. the fated mates concept and the dual nature of the characters. For me this all depends on the execution. One of my favorite romantic fantasy books is Anne McCaffrey’s first Pern book, Dragonflight, where the characters are telepathically linked to dragons who are both other and reflections of the subconscious self.

I feel that something similar is going on with this book. Brother Wolf, Charles’ wolf aspect, feels like a separate character whose feelings conflict with Charles’s at times, such as for example, at the very beginning of “Alpha and Omega” when the wolf is determined to make Anna his mate and Charles wants to wait a little longer to get to know her before deciding if he should court her.

OTOH, with Anna’s wolf, I would argue that she is an aspect of Anna — Anna’s defense mechanism, and the part of Anna that bore the brunt of the abuse so that the rest of Anna wouldn’t have to. I love how this mirrors the way some people deal with abuse in real life. It’s almost like Anna has dissociative identity disorder, and has created another part of herself that can withstand anything, so that she herself won’t have to bear this level of pain.

I really agree with Aoife BTW that these books do a terrific job of showing the healing progress in a way that is not too depressing but also doesn’t trivialize what Anna went through.

With regard to the Mercy Thompson books, I can only speak to Moon Called, but it is written in first person, so the tone is different IMO. I prefer the Charles and Anna series because we get the hero’s POV as well here.

As for Hunting Ground, it didn’t feel more romantic than “Alpha and Omega” or Cry Wolf to me. I do love the way Anna really comes into her own in the book though.

I hear what you are saying. But for me these stories were sooooo romantic. So I guess it would help if you clarified what you mean by “the falling in love elements.” I didn’t feel that just because Charles and Anna’s wolves chose each other meant that Anna and Charles had chosen each other.

To me “Alpha and Omega” was all about the scary aspect of falling in love. I find falling in love frightening in real life, because one doesn’t know the other person well yet in the falling in love stage of relationships, and yet that person has become so important to me, so much the center of my world. Should I trust them? Should I trust my feelings for them? Where do these sudden, powerful feelings come from? Will they ever go away? Do I want them to go away? Do I want this other person to go away, or will I feel like dying if they ever leave me?

For me, that is what falling in love feels like, and that conflict between fear and desire is something few romance novels capture really well. “Alpha and Omega” especially, but Cry Wolf as well, captured that very powerfully.

You’ll also note that I talk about enjoying the book more ‘with hindsight’. It’s difficult to express what I mean by this. When I got to the end of CW, I was somewhat underwhelmed yet intensely curious to read A&O. And after both of them, I found myself thinking a lot about the character after reading.

I’ve thought more, too, about the comments I made about missing out on that sense of delight the H/H feel for one another in my favourite romances. On reflection, I think what I was trying to say was that Charles and Anna don’t really *fall in love*. It’s more a case of discovering and coming to terms with a bond/love that is there from their very first encounter. And I think that in a way, that is a different kind of romance (maybe even, arguably, not a romance) from the falling in love sort of story. I think I missed the falling in love elements.

I have to say though that I’ve probably heard from more grateful readers as a result of that review than for any other review I’ve done, except perhaps the one I did of Ginn Hale’s Wicked Gentlemen. Not everyone loves “Alpha and Omega” and Cry Wolf, but the people who love them, really, really adore Anna and Charles.

With regard to the romance quotient, I thought the “Alpha and Omega” story was a pure romance cloaked in a story about pack dynamics. Cry Wolf has more urban fantasy in it, but “Alpha and Omega,” which is the one I’ve read seven or so times (and some of the readers who posted at DA have read many more times than that), seemed like the story of a courtship that was both tense and dizzying, in the way that to me, the best romances are.

I love, above all, the characters of Anna and Charles.

I love watching Anna’s evolution, her emergence from fear into finding her courage. She really comes into her strength in a big way in Hunting Ground, which makes the climax of that book very satisfying.

I love Charles, the way he is isolated by his role as his father’s executioner. I love that he has such a sensitive soul and yet time and time again, he has to kill. I love that he tries to protect Anna from the ferociousness that is part of his nature, from the nature of wolves, and yet he can’t, not really. It’s too late to protect her from the worst of it, so he has to face that flaw in his world, that shortcoming in his ability to protect.

I love the way Anna struggles, in Cry Wolf, to be okay with being a wolf, something she never chose and that was forced on her.

Most of all, I love (to paraphrase something Robin says) the tenderness with which Briggs views and lets us view her characters. There is such empathy and compassion on the part of the author, such awareness of the characters’ vulnerabilities — I can’t articulate it better than that.

And yet, for all that, Briggs doesn’t spare her characters from heartaches or moral dilemmas. She doesn’t pave their way or make life easy for them.

I also love the way the fantasy aspects of the story function as a metaphor. For example, when Anna, a rape survivor, calls on the spirit of her wolf to take over when she has sex with Charles, so that Anna’s consciousness is no longer fully present for that, it’s a great metaphor for the way some people who are raped or sexually abused dissociate during sex so that they won’t have to bear the painful feelings it brings up.

And I think the wolf aspect of many of the characters are also a metaphor for the wolf-eat-wolf nature of our own world, for the fact that we all have the capacity for violence. Briggs recognizes that like her characters, many of us are sensitive people in an insensitive world, a world that rewards competition and sometimes even ruthlessness, a world with brutality as well as beauty, war as well as warmth.

There is more I could say but I will stop here for now.

About Mercy Thompson having a similar feel: yes and no. Technically, yes. I often encountered that feeling of detachment in the Mercy novels. However, that feeling often seems like a part of Mercy’s personality and, as such, isn’t as off-putting as it is in Alpha and Omega. It can still be annoying, but it’s easier to bear. It’s also extrememly important in the way the climax of the third book is narrated. Again, I think this is mainly Briggs creating characters and situations to match her style.

And yet I love high fantasy (Susan Cooper, Alan Garner) … can this reader be saved? Is there an interim book you might recommend?