Book Review: Dances With Wolves by Michael Blake (Dances With Wolves #1)

 

I remember once, years ago, catching some snippets of the movie Dances with Wolves. It grabbed my attention, admittedly mostly because it had a wolf in it, but I never watched the thing in full. Then we flash forward to a few years ago, where I’ve now matured and am genuinely curious about the story of the movie. I happened to come across the book of this series on a secondhand book market, and just instantly bought it, seeing this as my chance to get into the story.

Full disclosure before we start: A) I still haven’t seen the movie in full and B), much more importantly, I’m white. This book centers heavily around the culture of the Comanche Native Americans, and I’m just looking at this as a reader of the book.

That said, let’s have a look at Dances with Wolves by Michael Blake. Spoilers ahead.

Lieutenant Dunbar is sent to live at a military fort, only to find it abandoned, so he chooses to live there alone with his horse Cisco. He befriends a local wolf and eventually comes across a group of Comanche that live near the fort. As time passes, he slowly connects more and more with the Native Americans living there. He soon finds himself questioning himself, and then the white men arrive, which means he’ll have to choose who he is loyal to.

I found this one to just be an average read. I couldn’t really get much into it. First of all, the main character is addressed with his title a distracting amount of times. This just really was hard to read for me. I’m okay with it for side characters, but for a main character whose POV we’re reading, it’s just repetitive. His Lieutenant rank also isn’t even relevant throughout a lot of the book, so why they keep doing it is beyond me.

The characters themselves I couldn’t get much into, either. The writing lacked depth and detail. Aside from Dunbar, characters weren’t described very thoroughly, which only ended up giving you a basic idea of their personalities a lot of the time. It also doesn’t help that there’s only one major female character, maybe even only one named female character; I’d have to go back and check.

As for how accurate the story is to the actual culture of the Comanche, I cannot tell. As I said before, I’m white and don’t have enough knowledge of these things. I was also not too fond of the whole “white savior” aspect of the story. Dunbar is in many situations one of the most proactive characters and warriors when he’s with the Comanche, which is just… not great.

Overall, I think that Dances with Wolves was just an okay book. I don’t think I’ll read it again, but I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything reading it. May still have to check out the movie sometime, though, as I’ve heard it’s better than the book.

I’m giving this book three out of five stars. I don’t actively recommend it to anyone, but if it sparks your interest maybe you could check it out. Or the movie. 

Rating: 3/5