Post-apocalyptic canine xenofiction is kind of a genre in and of itself I guess? I've looked at Darkeye, I've looked at Survivors, and now I'm tackling the first book of Dogs of the Spires. I was given a free copy to review, but per usual this does not impact my judgment. Spoilers ahead, this is First Light.
In this book we are introduced to Step, a lone dog living together with his brother. After ending up in one of the five dog packs that live near the abandoned location known as the Spires, he ends up accidentally causing a lot of tension between some of them, though he also makes friends. When the Duke, the son of the leader of pack he ends up joining, overthrows the previous Alpha, Step and his friends see it as their duty to rescue their former leader and restore him to his former glory.
This was just an overall really fun read, possibly my favorite to come out of the three book series I've mentioned above so far. I felt myself surprisingly getting attached to the characters really soon. Most of them are pretty standard and don't have a whole lot of development (yet, this is probably saved for future books for some of them), but I genuinely liked some of them. My favorites were probably Auburn, Hope and River. Step himself was a pretty generic protagonist, but he wasn't bad either. Duke and Delta made for intimidating villains, too. I can't wait to see what happens to them next.
The worldbuilding is pretty cool, too. The dogs have this concept of Spirits that can communicate with them through omens, there's these birds called greathawks (which I presume to be some type of eagle) that have connections to Alphas, and of course I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic settings. So far we don't really know what has happened to the humans in this universe so far, but it's clear that something major has gone down as the Spires (city) is completely abandoned by them.
I also quite liked the implication that all of these dogs are mutts since the time of full-bred human pets has long passed. The dogs aren't referred to by breed characteristics, but rather just their physical description, so you can just kind of make up your own idea of what they look like. I somehow imagined Auburn and Hope as Australian shepherd-looking mixes and Duke as some sort of Dobermann-pitbull-Xolo cross.
One very tiny nitpick is that I didn't like the incorrect term of Alpha used here (or in any dog/wolf story for that matter) but since the term is so ingrained in canine media I guess it's pretty much unavoidable in this point. I don't know, I always preferred the term "leader" for things like this, since the whole Alpha-Beta-Omega theory is outdated nonsense anyways.
I look forward to the next book of Dogs of the Spires. I may even get a physical copy of the first book at a later occasion because I like having physicals of my favorite xenofictions.
Rating: 5/5
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