Note:
The title of this book has been translated into English by me for the
reading comprehension of this blog's viewers as the book itself isn't
available in English (yet). The original title reads De wolvenroedel: De opstand van Lups Falsumor.
Dutch wolf xenofiction isn't very common so I'll take any that I can get! Let's have a look at this one!
Lupos Junior is a young gray wolf living in his pack in what is implied to be France. He's set to be next in line to be leader after his father, Lupos Senior. However, his cousin, a black wolf named Lupos Falsumor, isn't fond of his treatment within the pack and tries to usurp the power of both Junior and Senior multiple times. And when a group of hunters enters the forest, Falsumor seizes his opportunity and gets Senior severely injured and captured by the humans. It is not up to Junior to save his father and stand up against his vengeful cousin.
Not a bad plot for a book about wolves. A bit cliche, sure, but not bad. I just don't care much for the execution. The story is for younger readers, but even with that in mind it felt horribly rushed to me. We barely get any introduction to our main wolf pack, heck even our main character Junior, before the conflict arises.
This also leads us to the villain being very weak. Falsumor seems to have little to no actual motivation for his actions other than being evil and sometimes getting the short end of the stick within the pack. While this story uses the modern accurate portrayal of wolf packs as a family rather than the alpha-beta-omega ranking system, I think that Falsumor's position within the pack where he's sometimes dismissed quite roughly by the others may still be based on how omega wolves would be treated according to dominance theory. Which is an interesting take, but Falsumor's execution just felt so weak. I'd have loved to get to know more of his motivations. Right now he just comes across like he was wrongly dismissed a few times and instantly turned into a hateful villain trying to get Junior and his father killed to take the leadership position for himself. The rushed pace of the book barely gives us any time whatsoever to explore him and his motivations.
Same goes for Junior, our main character. What are his personality traits outside of just your generic heroic protagonist? None, because we don't get to spend enough time with him to explore him. I guess that this story is supposed to show his rise to becoming a leader after his father is injured? And that is definitely shown, with him briefly taking charge of the pack and later going to rescue his father from the hunters. And even thereafter while his father is recovering to some extent he does still lead the pack. But since Junior was already shown to be pretty much the perfect son from the start (the opposite of Falsumor acting rotten from the start) there's no real arc here. He just steps in when the pack needs him and that's it. No growth from here.
I'm also not sure if I care about the POV of a human forest ranger character here. Sure, it's nice to show that not all humans are bad in xenofiction stories, but at the same time his POV's didn't add much to the story. We as readers from the forest ranger's POV already know that he has no ill intentions, so it takes away any and all mystery during Junior's POV on whether or not this man can be trusted.
Oh, also, on a side note, I think that the naming of the wolves in this is rather confusing. As you may have noticed, there's a total of three characters named Lupos, so I've taken to referring to them by their second names instead (though technically Lupos Senior doesn't even have a second name, I just added that to make sure you guys don't confuse him for Lupos Junior). All other wolves in the pack also have a name that is in some way or form a variation on the word "lupine". Which gets very repetitive. Not a direct criticism of the story but I feel that more original names would've worked better. I can easily see a young reader struggling to remember who is who in this pack with very same-y names. Heck even I couldn't tell who was who outside of out three main male wolves, Junior, Senior and Falsumor.
So, yeah. This story could've worked as a concept but it needed more pages and definitely more work on the characters and their arcs as we barely get to know them before the story is over. It's not awful and I don't regret reading it but I feel that with a bit more work it truly could've been a pretty good wolf xenofiction for younger readers.
Rating: 2.5/5
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