This is one of these books that I desperately wanted to obtain the English physical variant of...but I just can't without having to pay a ridiculous amount. Seriously, this book is like 50 Euros on Amazon to obtain in that edition. So I settled for a physical Dutch hardcover instead, only cost me 3 Euros. Let's review it, shall we? Spoilers ahead.
Based on a true story, this book follows the black wolf Martha and her pack through their trials and tribulations. Told in a similar fashion to the Jack London wolf/dog books (no anthropomorphism), we get to see how Martha and her pack cope after being collared and re-located to a different part of America. Martha deep down just wants one thing: to find a home.
Talk about depressing as fuck. Seriously, for all the cute wolf puppy moments this book has, don't go in expecting a cheerful story. It really pulls no punches. Even the first chapter starts off with Martha's mate dying while she still has her pups to feed, leaving only her and the elderly wolf Oldtooth to care for the litter.
After that there's a brief instance where things don't get too depressing. The pups slowly grow up and Oldtooth and Martha, despite obviously having to balance hunting with watching them, do a good job looking for them. Then they all get taken to a facility where researchers collar and study them, before releasing them elsewhere.
From this point on, everything goes to hell. Martha is so startled by her new surroundings that she abandons her half-grown pups and Oldtooth and just runs for a week straight without eating in what she thinks to be the direction of her old pack grounds, until she literally collapses into a coma and almost dies. The two pups that were relocated have to look after themselves after Oldtooth is forced to leave them as well, causing them to starve to death one by one. Oldtooth, unable to hunt properly with his wounded paw and broken teeth, is forced to prey upon cattle before being shot.
I really thought that after this depressing bunch of events, things would get better. Martha does end up surviving her almost-starvation and starts a new pack with a wolf named Greatfoot, but even that has to end in tragedy as she's poached not long after the pups are born. Greatfoot is not much later hit by a car, so the six pups remain on their own.
Don't get me wrong, the writing was definitely good, but it's just such a depressing story. Animal suffering, animal death, poaching, it's all there. I really expected this to be some kind of heroic story about how Martha's (first) pack survives despite the odds, maybe with one or two deaths along the way, but it ends up being misery almost the entire way through.
If I do have a criticism for the writing, it would be that the wolves don't often feel all that distinct from one another. Particularly the pups could start to feel like the same characters after a while, distinguished only by pelt color and sex. But other than that, it was great. Great pacing and you really do feel the differences between the adult wolf characters such as Martha, Greatfoot and Oldtooth.
But man, it's a very depressing story. It's not a bittersweet story that has some kind of good ending, it's mostly just bitter. Yes, some of the final pups do end up surviving for a while younger after being fed by a person looking after them from a distance, but some of them still ended up either vanishing or preying on cattle as they got older. Not the most uplifting story, but still very well-written.
Rating: 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment