Another series by Michelle Paver. As you probably know if you've been following this blog for a while, I'm a huge fan of what I've read of her Wolf Brother series so far! So I was excited to see she wrote another, this time set in ancient Greece in the Bronze Age. Spoilers ahead.
Hylas is an orphaned farm boy, an Outsider to the local villagers, who is one day brutally attacked by a group of warriors known as Crows. He is separated from his only other family, his sister, and manages to escape and soon comes into the possession of a very important bronze knife. Hylas from then on is constantly on the run for the Crows who are not only after him, but also the knife. On his journey, Hylas ends up bonding with a dolphin named Spirit, and he later (somewhat reluctantly) befriends a girl named Pirra, the runaway daughter of the high-priestess of Keftiu. The two will have to find a way to survive the ongoing threat of the Crows hunting them down.
Overall a pretty darn great first installment. I wasn't as excited going into this one as I was with Wolf Brother. I'm generally not that interested in ancient Greece, the Bronze Age, and especially not dolphins, so despite me wanting to read this book I didn't expect to be instantly hooked.
But thing is, I was. From the moment I started reading I was instantly invested in Hylas' story, much in the same way as Wolf Brother did. Heck, they even both start kind of similarly with an action scene (or the aftermath of one) and the main character losing a family member in some way or form. I'm not always a fan of being thrown right into the action when entering a new series, but Paver really knows how to do this well and build the world from there, rather than first getting us familiar with the characters and world before the action starts.
The world-building also was quite good, though there's still a lot left vague or up to interpretation to be probably explored in future installments. This does take place in Ancient Greece, but you won't find most familiar old Greek gods here, instead finding a few other divine characters and beliefs. I'm not well-versed in ancient Greek beliefs at all, so whether the gods present in this book actually existed or are simply made up by Paver I do not know, but they definitely were introduced well here and have a lot of interesting potential for future installments.
Another thing I liked: the characters! They can be surprisingly mean to one another, but despite this I didn't find myself disliking most of them. Hylas and Pirra do eventually grow to care for one another, but for a lot of the story they really dislike one another, to put things mildly. They're even actively mean sometimes, but you honestly also really understand their situations. Hylas just lost the only family he had, his pet dog and his sister, and is now being hunted down for a reason he doesn't know. Pirra grew up basically a prisoner in her own home and was forced into a marriage she didn't want, which led to her escaping but also being miserable at surviving in the wilderness because of how sheltered she's always been. These two really don't get along at first, but it was therefore al the more satisfying to slowly see them put aside differences to help one another, followed by the beginnings of a pretty strong friendship. Still, they do end the book apart from one another, but I have no doubt that they'll meet again in future installments and that their bond will continue to grow.
Another character outside of our leads who I found to be interesting was Telamon, Hylas' childhood friend who is torn between loyalty to his old friend and his kin. See, Telamon is related to the clan that is in charge of the Crows, making him a Crow himself by extension. Now Telamon has to choose between helping Hylas or giving him up to the Crows. And you can just feel how much this is tearing him up.
Telamon is not a great and likable character a lot of the time, he stands up consistently for his family even when they do bad things, but you can also tell that he's really struggling internally with what he has to do. He's around the same age as Hylas (thirteen), and you can just feel how this privileged kid has been groomed from childhood to think and act in the same way as his kin, and now Telamon is very much struggling with this, and it's conveyed well. Again, he's often not a very likable character. He does and says bad things. But that's what makes him complex, especially now that we get to see him struggle internally so much between Hylas and the Crows. He's not the most likable character out of the bunch, but in my opinion the most well-written one out of him, Hylas and Pirra.
As for Spirit the dolphin...I don't know, I'm not that fond of him. Like I've said before, I'm not all that interested in dolphins, but Spirit as a character also just wasn't very interesting to me. He becomes a friend of Hylas' and goes on a quest to find his pod after they go missing, but I wasn't very invested in his chapters. He also feels, unlike Wolf from Wolf Brother, as a one-off animal sidekick character since the book ends with both Spirit and Hylas concluding that they cannot be together because one belongs on land and one in the sea. This scene also didn't hit me emotionally as it should have because I didn't find the bond between Hylas and Spirit to be all that well-written, unlike the one between Wolf and Torak in Paver's other series, for example. Spirit and Hylas meet up a couple of times, they rescue one another and then their bond is already over. Maybe I'm wrong about this and Spirit will re-appear in future installments, but the ending made it seem pretty conclusive that despite their friendship their bond did end with the end of the first book.
But overall this was still a super thrilling first installment. Lots of action, awesome world-building and great, flawed main characters. I look forward to reading the next book.
Rating: 4/5
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