Normally, I can split TJ Klune’s works into two distinct categories: books that feel like they were made for me and books that make me cringe so hard I can’t finish them. This one is a curious beast that doesn’t fully fit either shelf. It does lean strongly toward the “made for me,” and it only made me cringe in that weird special secondhand embarrassment way once, but there are some aspects of it that leave me uncomfortable.

Technically, this is a paranormal romance, but with the deep dive into the main character’s head and life story and the way it starts with Ox being in about his mid-teens and follows him from a lonely, bullied kid to a position of local power with a strong support network, it reads kind of like a bildungsroman. I really enjoyed hanging out with Ox through all of his trials and tribulations, seeing him grow into his potential, watching other characters appreciate him. Despite the hardships he’s had to face, overall this journey felt healing, heartwarming, and life-affirming.

For the most part, I really enjoyed the writing. It was poignant, immersive, and I liked how all sorts of small descriptions of the characters’ surroundings were woven into their interactions. All those little touches that grounded the story in specific locations and breathed life into those places. At the same time, there were definitely parts that got incredibly repetitive. I recognize why those persistent memories/motives were important for Ox, but I think there were other ways to include them without just saying the same thing over and over every couple of chapters. For example, instead of having him recall his mother popping a soap bubble on his ear, he could have seen a soap bubble in real time and had some kind of feeling, or got soap in his ear, etc. Those would still send the reader’s mind back to the original soap bubble scene, if timed appropriately. And that’s just one example, there are many more I can think of.

What really didn’t sit well for me, until way into the second half of the book, was the romance. The characters meet when Ox is 16 and Joe is 10, and Joe immediately feels the pressing need to latch onto Ox with all his energy. For the longest time, there’s nothing there but friendship, and Ox also becomes friends with Joe’s older brothers who are closer to him in age. But then at some point, when Ox is 23 and Joe is 17, the transition to romance starts, and while it was slow and nothing sexual happened at that time, it just made me uncomfortable. Like, come on, how do you just stop seeing Joe as a kid in this situation? Especially since he is still a kid! A six-year gap is often nothing between adults, but the younger people are, the more even a couple of years matters, and in this case, Joe has been growing up in front of Ox and Ox has practically become a family member. It was just. Really weird. In the second half of the book, when they started reconnecting after Joe’s been away for a while for plot reasons, that sense of weirdness was pretty much absent though, unless I focused on the fact that they had already attempted a relationship before Joe’s departure. I think if there was no such attempt and the romance only begun when they reconnected, I would have enjoyed the story way more. Because that period of absence gave them both a chance to grow individually and amass their own life experiences, making them into slightly different people and creating a distance between the kids they were and the adults they become.

My favorite aspect of the book is undeniably the found family Ox builds as he goes, starting with Gordo’s shop so early on and ending up with his own big pack. I loved how pretty much every character in this big network had depth, and all the individual connections and relationships were so unique. I also appreciated how the presence of all these people/wolves/witches in Ox’s life didn’t fully erase the scars from his father’s abandoning him. That was something that still had happened, and left its mark, but he ended up having, or rather building, something new, something important, something future-shaped. There’s actually a lot of scar-related symbolism in the book that focuses on the weight of our past experiences, even the painful once, and how healing from them doesn’t mean rendering them insignificant, and this is something that resonates with me a lot. I’m very here for it.