The second and presumably last in the Redstone series. I covered Nashoga before, so now let's take a gander at the sequel, spoilers ahead.
Some time after the defeat of Farkas, Nashoga is once more happily the alpha of the Redstone Pack, now having a family with his mate. However, when Farkas returns and takes over the nearby Thunder Clan, Nashoga must once again face his adversary.
Honestly I am pretty neutral on this book the same way I was about the first. It's just very standard as far as basic wolf xenofiction goes and doesn't have a whole lot that sets it apart from other books/media in the genre.
Our characters were definitely a bit more interesting here, however. Nashoga was pretty standard in the first book, but I preferred him over here. He takes in Buck's son like his own after the loss of his own pup. I also liked Bly's personality. Tala actually reveals that she's not all innocence personality-wise when she repeatedly rejects Buck's son as her own and even reveals she actually hates him. That's all pretty interesting stuff when the characters in the last book all felt rather one-dimensional.
However, one character that wasn't improved upon in any way was Farkas, our main villain. Last book he was pretty much as basic a stock villain you could get: just mustache-twirling and evil pretty much for the sake of being evil. No interesting backstory, personality or character traits to go along with him. And he's very much the same here. I just don't care at all about this villain and the fact that we're supposed to see him as a big threat just doesn't work when there's so little to his character.
The story itself had a decent pace and didn't feel like it was flying by as quickly as the first book (where a major criticism I had was that Buck's and Nashoga's friendship didn't feel as deep as it was portrayed to be because they only knew each other for such a short time). You see Bly and Blue growing up and it's very cool to see these two that are so different, elk and wolf, still consider each other siblings, even after how Tala treated Bly.
As for the whole prophecy and the newly introduced legendary pack of red wolves, it all felt really underutilized and more like a last-minute addition to the story than genuine plot points. They didn't totally come out of left field, but they just didn't leave an impact. Also, the prophecy honestly felt really unneeded. I'm generally a fan of keeping them out of stories when possible, and it just kind of felt unnecessary here since it didn't do all that much for the plot.
Overall this is a pretty decent book and I consider it a minute improvement over the first, but overall it's still not all that great. If you're interested in wolf xenofiction I guess I recommend these two, though.
Rating: 3/5
No comments:
Post a Comment