Growling and howling

Richard St. Ofle expresses raw, gritty emotion in his poetic memoir, No Wolf: The Waygoing Compromise. He unabashedly bares his heart while describing the experience of leaving his wife for a strange new love, with a stop on the way in an even stranger new country. He tosses in frequent references to contemporary media and literature that illustrates sentiment of the moment, assuming readers are familiar with said reference. The prose is frequently broken by passionate stanzas of poetry. The emotions expressed throughout No Wolf may be authentic, but they’re also over-the-top. St. Ofle would do better to connect it with just a few more details; though still a riveting tale, the factual blanks are confusing. No Wolf could have been a beautiful love story if St. Ofle had written more about the hows and whys of his realization that he had everything he wanted—back home with his wife.