I grabbed S.P. Wayne‘s M/M romance, Winter Wolf, from the Amazon KDP list.

I would usually include a description at this point, but Winter Wolf‘s is so long it’s practically a short story by itself. So feel free to go here and read it on its Amazon page. I’m not cluttering this post up with it. Seriously, it’s unnecessarily long. Suffice it to say the novella is a sweet werewolf romance with an M/M pairing.

Review:
I’m just going to go ahead and get the biggest criticism out of the way first so that I can spend the rest of this review raving about the book. Winter Wolf needs an editor fairly badly. There are missing and misused words, and though less frequent, grammar mistakes and typos too. Plus, POVs shift at a dizzying pace with little to no warning, so it can sometimes be a little hard to keep up. I have definitely seen worse and it’s not really too hard to figure out what the author actually means, so the text is still readable. But there are too many examples to not point out it in any complete review.

I wish I used star ratings on this blog so that I could say, ‘if it’s bad enough to warrant a mention I often would consider dropping a star for poor editing, but not this time.’  That’s such a simple way to make the point. It’s also true. The story and writing (editing aside) are just too wonderful for anything but 5 stars. Wayne’s style is surprisingly evocative. I actually felt Axton’s skittishness. I ground my teeth for his self denials and my heart ached for his ‘mourning’ periods. He felt incredibly fragile. I didn’t connect as fully with Leander, but the story is told largely from Axton’s POV. There are no other characters.

Axton was also simply a great character. He was noble, honourable, and utterly vulnerable without being wimpy in any way. I loved watching him flounder and then find his proverbial feet. It was nice to see him turn the werewolf genre on it’s hierarchical head. Axton was definitely a beta, or maybe even omega type wolf. There was nothing alpha about him and I don’t remember the last werewolf book I read that wasn’t about an alpha wolf.

This is a really bittersweet story, with a writing style that perfectly matches the characters it describes. I highly recommend it. There seems to be a sequel on the way and I’m a little torn about how to feel about that. So often I’ve continued a series and felt it would have been kinder to the characters to stop at the first one, but I’d also simply love to see more of Ax and Lee. No doubt I’ll read it.