Book Review: Herta by Aarie Aalders

 

 Note: This book isn't available in English (yet).

A xenofiction about a German shepherd raised by wolves, what could possibly go wrong? Spoilers ahead?

Herta is a German shepherd pup who is born among humans, but soon is raised by the leading female of a wolf pack. From here he becomes a "wolfdog" (in spirit at least), a dog with wolf-life tendencies. He even becomes the leader of the large pack someday, but as an adult he slowly starts to drift closer to a certain human family, particularly their boy named Max. Herta befriends Max and eventually realizes that his heart truly lies with his human family after all, not with being a part of the wolf pack. Eventually in the city he starts to slowly find a new pack, not one of wolves, but one of many different types of dogs.

To answer my question I posed in the introduction of this review: a lot. I've read quite a few indie xenofictions before. Some of them have been less than perfect, usually formatting wise or with an extra typo here and there. But good god, this book is another level of amateuristic. And it was written by a grown man, by the way, this isn't just a young person's self-published story. Aalders has published several books in the past, so he has experience.

To start: the formatting feels all wrong. My cover printed way to the side instead of with the image of Herta in the center like it should be. There's just a large white empty area on the right side of the book's cover. The text inside is a little better, but it still doesn't look like how most books look. 

There's random images and photos scattered throughout the book, none of which are properly attributed. I'm not directly accusing Aalders of theft here, but unless all these images are CC0/public domain this could get him in legal trouble, and even then it's heavily recommended to properly credit and source where the author got the images to make sure all of them are properly sourced. Nothing here was credited or sourced. And even the uncredited images aside, the way they're strewn about and there being no sense of consistency to them (some are photos, some are paintings and heck there's even a picture of a bear figurine at one point).

As for the story... For one, it's full of typos and punctuation mistakes. I don't just mean one, two or three, which I can usually look past especially in an indie. I mean that the entire book was chock-full of them. Heck, one word was even consistently misspelled. The word "pups" is consistently spelled as "pubs" which is wrong, and there were others too. The author also can't seem to make up his mind whether to use the Dutch or English spelling of "alpha" (alfa in Dutch/alpha in English). 

And even then, the story is a mess as well. The first two chapters are surprisingly enough not really a part of the main story, rather two completely separate short stories that don't have anything to do with the main story about Herta. Chapter one and two mention two other dogs named Herta (one a white shepherd, the other a German shepherd but not the one who lives with wolves) and it then very briefly becomes an educational non-fiction book about the different types of dog breeds. Then the story of the "real" Herta finally starts. 

This one, too, is a bit of a mess. It constantly goes back and forth between actually "showing" us what happens, allowing us to experience what's going on while on page and in dialogue, and just "telling" by literally narrating everything including the dialogue. Something like "mother wolf said X" Instead of "Y", said Herta. This type of "telling" writing was the most prevalent, and despite the story being very short it soon because tiring to read. It makes the reader feel disconnected from the characters and what is going on the moment because it feels like it's just being indirectly told to us rather than us being in the moment with the characters. And that aside, its horribly inconsistent and makes the already personality-less characters even more bland because we rarely get to read what they even talk like. 

Finally, I'm pretty sure I spotted an inconsistency in the time and setting. A car or ambulance something along those lines is mentioned to exist at one point, but this is established to take place around the pioneer days of North America. During which cars probably didn't exist yet. As for the setting, at one point a deer species (roe) is mentioned that doesn't live in North America. So that's inconsistency in the setting as well.

And finally, of course factually there's all sorts of things wrong. The alpha theory is used very wrongly, maned wolves are mentioned to be foxes (they're not, they're their own type of canid), Herta is said to be bigger than any wolf despite wolves being bigger than fully grown German shepherds, I could go on and on.

So, yeah, bottom line is: this feels like a first draft. Not even an edited first draft, just a first draft. Aalders could really do with a few beta readers to revise his stories and also should work on his grammar or get someone to fix it for him. I'm usually a bit more lenient on indies when they have mistakes because they're obviously not overseen by a major publishing house, but this one is very bad by indie standards as well. 

Honestly, the story concept of a German shepherd living among wolves before deciding to form a new life as a pet isn't even bad and could be done very well, but the execution is just very amateurish and botched. 

Rating: 1/5