Book Review: When Dealing with Wolves by A.R. Thompson (The Wyrdseren Duology #1)

 

This is my first time doing an ARC review, meaning that I received a free copy of the book ahead of time to review before the book itself comes out on June 30th! As always, this being a free copy I've been given does not impact my rating of the book. Spoilers ahead.

In the world of The Wyrdseren, men live in walled towns in fear of the creatures outside, one of them being wolves. They also fear the wyrdness, a form of magic that many outside beings and even some humans possess. Rostfar, one of our protagonists, ventures beyond the walls of the town when her daughter goes missing without a trace.

I definitely have mixed thoughts on this book, but overall the positives outweighed the negatives for me. I'll start with the negatives to just get them out of the way: I definitely spotted some typos here and there, particularly in earlier parts of the book. The book is also said to contain autism representation, something I'm obviously starved for, being autistic myself, however I for the life of me couldn't figure out which character is supposed to be the autistic one in this story. I'd hoped it'd have been a bit more obvious, because I didn't read any of these characters as particularly autistic. 

I also didn't find the world building to be all that compelling. It has its interesting points, but somehow I never felt quite as immersed in the world as I want to be with fantasy. There was always this distance between me as a reader and the world the book was telling me about. That's not to say the world building is bad, but it just never fully engaged me.

With that out of the way, let's get to the positives. First of all, our main characters, particularly Aethren and Rostfar, were great. I related to Aethren a lot (not just because I'm non-binary) and, while it took me a while to do so, I did find myself attaching me to Rostfar's character. I also quite liked some of the wolves, such as Yrsa and Grae. Heck, even the Unwolf was a compelling character. Thrigg was also great. There's definitely some characters I couldn't get into as much, but our major characters overall were really compelling and I really did want to see them succeed. 

I also really liked some of the concept of the creatures, such as the Unwolf, the Other (wreathers) and the raven-like species Thrigg was a member of. The way the wolf pack was described was also great, with them all essentially being one big family in the end. I did feel for Grae, who ends up leaving the pack, but his resolution in the end isn't all that bad, either. 

I definitely liked reading this book, particularly the latter half. It just failed to grasp me as well as some other fantasies do. I do still recommend you check it out once it comes out, though.

Rating: 3.5/5