Book Review: The Way of Kings by Louise Searl

I've previously reviewed Kona's Song, a book about wolves by the same author. It was a fine book that had quite a bit of unrealized potential, so I did want to read more by Searl. Turns out, the author did write another book, this time about lions, so let's have a look. Spoilers ahead.

We meet Kachula, a young lion living in his own pride. When he is a young-adult and two nomad males take over, he and his brother Shango are banished and now forced to look after themselves. They soon grow successful at survival, but they wish to have a pride of their own. And even after they manage to obtain one, it's not an easy task to keep their subjects safe.

I liked this book quite a lot, even better than Kona's Song. I felt that it was a slight improvement over the last, and lives up to its potential way more.

I really dig how this book both mixes real lion behavior (including the darker aspects such as having to kill cubs) with more human aspects and even some mythology. However, unlike in Kona's Song where they mythology was sparsely used, the mythical elements are a little bit more at play here with Kachula meeting his deceased daughter once and later joining the dead lions with Simba, the first king.

Another thing I really liked was its portrayal of hyenas. I'm a big fan of them, and it sucks that they're 90% of the time portrayed as ruthless villains in media taking place in Africa, but this book has a nice balancing act going on. In the first half or so, Kachula does see hyenas as savages that can't talk, but after he meets a helpful banished hyena who bothered to learn his language, he starts to realize that it was he, not the hyenas, who was short sighted. He and other lions are the ones who always wrote them off as dumb and ruthless, when they are actually intelligent and compassionate just like them, if anyone just bothered for a moment to get to know them. His friendship with Yar, unlikely as it was, was just super wholesome. I liked this part of the book the most, showing that this time it was the lions who were bigoted towards the hyenas, not the other way around.

There wasn't really an overarching plot in this one, much like with Felix Salten's Bambi it's just an animal growing up and living his life, but honestly that was fine to me. I liked this book, better than Kona's Song, which did have more of a plotline going on. Despite there not being an overarching goal other than "survival", I did want Kachula to succeed. 

I was also happy he managed to capture his pride without killing the former male and having to kill any cubs, because despite them being lions this would make him a pretty irredeemable protagonist. I know he's an animal with instinct, but he's also very anthropomorphized, so this really wouldn't fly if you ask me. 

The characters themselves weren't amazing or anything, but they did have flaws and some personality traits to tell them apart, I think more so than in Searl's other book. I also like that even our protagonist has his own flaws to overcome, such as his own misogyny at first (briefly, luckily) and later his bigotry towards hyenas. And I'm happy he got to live a long and happy life with Shango as the pride's leading males. 

I also like the idea of the animals using actual words in an African language, I think Swahili, to refer to each species. A lion is a simba, a hyena is a fisi, a chui is a leopard, etc. The narration of the author does use the actual English names of the animals, however. I'm not quite sure if I think they should've gone all the way and have the narration use the Swahili words as well and just having a vocabulary list in the back, or if they should just keep it this way. Either way, I like how the animals have their own words for each species and how it ties back to their mythology (the species' names are generally also names of characters in their mythology of their own respective species. So the mythological lion is called Simba, etc.).

Overall a pretty good book I do recommend. Kona's Song is still fine as well, but does leave much more things to be desired. Check this one out if you like animal xenofiction.

Rating: 3.5/5