Book Review: The Sight by David Clement-Davies (The Sight #1)

 

I actually have a history with this book. Back in the day, I used to loathe this one, together with the Wolves of the Beyond series. Nowadays I'm more open-minded and of course open to re-visiting books I preciously had beef with. 

I recently took a look at Wolves of the Beyond again and while I still don't feel right calling the series good (it's not), it's nowhere near as bad as I made it out to be in the past. So let's see how The Sight does upon a re-read. It has one thing going for it: I do really love Clemen-Davies' earlier, work, Fire Bringer. Spoilers ahead.

In The Sight we travel to the past in Transylvania, where wolves roam free in packs and are often being hunted by man. We meet Larka, a white she-wolf born with the mystical gift (considered a curse by some) called the Sight, which allows her to do various magical things such as seeing through the eyes of birds or seeing glimpses of the future. However, an older she-wolf with the same gift is dead-set on bringing about the rise of Wolfsbane (basically Wolf Satan). Only Larka can seemingly stop her, which may require a huge sacrifice on her part.

Parts of me really enjoyed this book as much as Fire Bringer, but other parts just fell flat for me. So let's take a look.

First: the things I liked. The world-building and concept of the Sight, the location of ancient Transylvania/the Balkans is a unique one, the animal-speak words and the fact that this is set in the same continuity as Fire Bringer (which is referenced but not overly so). However, that's kind of where my praise for the book ends. 

While Fire Bringer's characters weren't the most engaging, they still had decently established personalities and some of them even got an arc. Here, most of the characters (especially the side/more minor ones) felt like blank slates. Which is fine for a few side characters, but even our main pack felt like it had a bunch of filler characters that were just there to die eventually whose personality traits I just couldn't name (Skop, Kipcha, Bran, Khaz and heck even Kar despite being a major character that doesn't die still was boring as fuck). Our main character, Larka, is a huge bore, I could care less about Huttser and Palla, Morgra and Slavka were underwhelming villains and the only character in the end I genuinely ended up finding interesting was Fell...who is not present for the vast majority of the book. So definitely subtracting some points for characters here. Again, they needn't be the most memorable, but at least some basic semblance of a personality I care about would've been nice.

The wolf society is also inaccurate (basically the whole alpha-beta-omega concept which is outdated), but I won't count it that much against the book because it was only two years before the publication of The Sight that this theory got debunked in the first place. So I'll cut the book some slack because at this point the alpha-beta-omega theory was still very prevalent and believed to be accurate, unlike some books which still use the same concept many years later.

Something The Sight suffered from that Fire Bringer also did was namedropping characters too much. Having almost every line of dialogue repeat the name of character B that character A is talking to and then vice versa is just very, very distracting. I'm not sure if it's more prevalent here or in Fire Bringer, but either way it's just a part of Clement-Davies' writing voice I cannot get into.

Another thing I kind of disliked was the weird disdain this book seems to have towards barren people/characters. Like if it just was accepted in this society and brought up like that, fine, but this book actively seems to have some kind of vendetta against the characters who are. It's said multiple times that to be barren is "the worst fate for a she-wolf". Uhuh, what about she-wolves who don't want pups? Then there's Morgra, whose whole reason for becoming a villain was the fact that she was barren and thus couldn't bear any pups that would love her. She ended up accidentally killing another wolf's pup and that pretty much sealed the deal of her becoming a villain that was already being made due to her feeling unloved. I don't know, this whole handling of the barren subject made me somewhat uncomfortable. I can imagine someone who can't get pregnant reading this and feeling rather put off. I don't know what it is with wolf books and their hatred towards barren characters, because Wolves of the Beyond had this as well, where all barren she-wolves were forced into a role where they would have to leave pups the packs deemed "defective" behind to die.

So surely this book must suck? Nope, definitely not. Heck, I'd even call it decent-bordering-on-good. It's just not as good as the preceding Fire Bringer. I will definitely check out Fell in due time, but for now just reading The Sight will have to do. It's nowhere near as bad as I remember, but also has quite a few elements working against it.

Rating: 3.5/5