For those not in the loop, a while back a team of animators known as Silver Sky Studios started a project named Wolf. It's to be a independent fully 2D-animated movie about a pack of wolves in North America. The project has seemingly gotten quite far, judging by the previews they've put out on their YouTube channel, however the last update on the project has been a while ago. I am uncertain of its current status, but still hope they complete it someday!
All of this is leading up to this book, which has already been released: a prequel novel to the movie. I legit wanted to get this book since I first discovered the project as a youngun, but due to my parents not wanting to buy from Amazon (or honestly any online sources for the most part) I had to wait. Then, by the time I was old enough to order it by myself, it was unavailable for quite a while. But it's back up and available, so I finally managed to snag a copy! Let's dive right in, spoilers ahead.
In this short novel, we learn how the main pack featuring in Wolf came to be. We meet our protagonist Janus, an orphaned wolf pup raised by a goddess, and the other wolves he comes across on his journey and eventually ends up forming a pack with. From here on he has to deal with humans, a rival pack and has to look for a place to call home.
Short but sweet really is the best way to describe this book. How to judge it is also kind of hard: it really depends on how you look at it.
If you were to judge it by itself as a standalone novel: it's simply not all that great. The pacing is way too fast, we don't really get a very clear impression of all our character's personalities and the conflict feels like it's resolved too easily.
But if you look at it as a simple prequel meant to set up characters and plot threads for later events: it's fine. Still not the best book ever, obviously, but it does its job well. We don't get too much page-time with each character, but keep in mind that there's still an hour+ of time we're going to spend with them when the movie is done. So more character development will obviously follow.
I'm going to give this book the benefit of the doubt and judge it as what it actually is: a prequel novel. Of course, with the status of the movie project being unknown, this may be the only completed content regarding the Wolf projects we get if the film never ends up completed. But I'm going to be positive and for now think that the project will be finished someday.
Okay, so how is the book itself? Like mentioned before: brief. It's only a little longer than a hundred pages and it does cover a lot of ground within said page-count. We meet the gods and learn about them and their laws. We see Luna take in Janus. We see Janus' first encounters with dogs and man and other wolves. We meet Shadow, Janus' future beta. We meet Star (Janus' future love interest) and her adoptive son Jack. We see the conflict of Rift and his pack, as well as the wolves' brief interactions with humans and their pets.
It's quite a lot to shove into such a short book and even when looking at it from a prequel-novel POV I do think this book would've benefited from being at least 200 pages long. Just to give all the events a tiny bit more room to breathe, because currently the reader is being hit with plot thread after plot thread in a really short timeframe.
The characters themselves are pretty one-note in this, and none of them really go through any major character development outside of probably Janus and Luna, but it's honestly fine, especially keeping in mind that the movie will deal with these characters even more. Janus will be our main character in the film, and his family is featured prominently, meaning other characters such as Shadow, Star and Jack will probably get their time to shine as well.
If there is one other criticism I have for this book, it'll be how it handled the wolf pack structures. I know I've been very adamant about this in the past but recently have been more and more cool with "wrong" depictions of wolf packs, including in fiction. We all know by now that the alpha-beta-omega theory is bogus, however the term "alpha" is nowadays still sometimes used to refer to the breeding male and female of a pack respectively.
With Coming Home/Wolf being fictional I normally wouldn't have as much of an issue here. It's fiction, you can do whatever you want even if it means applying an outdated theory for your pack structure that frankly has done quite a bit of harm when applied in dog training. But here's the thing: Wolf and Coming Home are inherently trying to be a more realistic depiction of wolf packs. It literally says so in the prologue of this book.
And yes, there's things such as gods in this, but they are kept very minor and barely ever interact with the mortal world (Luna taking in Janus is explicitly against their laws and normal order of business). Outside of that, this book and by proxy the movie are trying to portray more realistic wolf behavior. Heck, it's even based on a real location and real events (a location in Wyoming and the fact that wolves were almost hunted to extinction in the 1920s). So when they proudly claim in the prologue to try to depict "real wolf behavior" in their story but then continue to use the alpha-beta-omega structure that has me scratching my head a bit. The movie project was started about 13 years ago (at least, that's as far back as the teaser archives go, but the theory was already debunked for roughly 10 years at that point.
I can't even fully blame them as the theory was (is) simply so widespread, especially at that time, that a lot of books and heck even zoos/wolf centers used it, but still. Bit late to be using the theory (even if the book was published a tad earlier, in 2007). I hope they fix this in the movie since that isn't out yet, but since the book already uses it that would cause inconsistencies. Ah well. C'est la vie.
Overall, I do think this is a good book and good setup for the events of the movie! Could it be improved upon if they added a couple more dozen pages? Yes, but for what it is it does its job well. I still look forward to the movie if that ever comes out and do like the book despite the minor qualms I have with it!
Rating: 4/5
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