I must say, shifter stories never really interested me, but then people convinced me to read Kim Dare’s Duck!, which really shook me up. I’m still not that interested in shifter stories, but it certainly didn’t put me off this book, which is the second of Kari Gregg’s I’ve read. I’d give this story 4.5 stars if I could, since it is really good on the whole, and it’s flaws - for me - are quite minor.
“I, Omega” is a bit like Duck!, in that in broad outline, it concerns a submissive man, Gabriel, whose world gets turned upside down by a dom who takes control of him like no man has. As in Duck! there’s a bit of a secret aspect that the sub needs to discover about himself, but where in Kim Dare’s book, the secret is obvious to the reader and the story is really about how the characters deal with it, in “I, Omega” it’s less obvious and it’s really about the sub’s own self-discovery. This is one of the areas where the story is less than successful, although not by much. The dom and his pack know what Gabriel needs to understand, so it’s difficult for them to talk about it enough for the reader to understand it too. I think we need a little more.
The story-telling is another teeny nit for me. It starts in the middle, and tells the beginning in bits of flashbacks or conversations. That’s not necessarily wrong, but in this case it just didn’t work for me. I had to think too much and it disrupted the flow of the story. It’s just a guess, but I suspect this would be a stronger book if we had it start to finish.
The sex - and there’s lots of it - is pretty hot, and the BDSM aspect is probably the best I’ve read for a while, especially in that limits and safe words are discussed, and even tested. You don’t normally see this in BDSM books, where sadly, violence is often passed off as kink.
