Book Review: The War of the Wolves by Gabrielle E. Scanio

 More wolf xenofiction. Let's go. Spoilers ahead.

Luna is just an ordinary timber wolf living her life when her entire family is killed by a group of pure white wolves which is terrorizing the local wolf packs, leaving her the sole survivor of her pack. The white villainous pack is exterminating left and right. Luna meets up with a group of other survivors and friends and their band will have to stand against the villainous pack of white wolves.

Overall a good concept for a story. The execution wasn't perfect, however this book was published when the author was very young so I will not be hard on this book. I do praise aspects of the book for sure. The story, while basic, definitely works. Some of the characters (especially Bullet) are written decently and have  a lot of potential for sure. The villains are a legitimate threat not to be messed with and Luna isn't by any means a bad protagonist.

My main feedback for Scanio (though by now the author is of course over a decade older since publishing) would be to work on the pacing and prose of the book. The pacing was just...really fast. It's a short book, being roughly 80-90 pages long. The story definitely works, but I feel that for the large and epic story it's trying to tell, it should've been a bit longer. Right now the book just flies by in an instant, leaving very little breathing room for the reader and some plot points don't quite hit their mark quite as much because before we know it they're thrown into another part of the story. It also doesn't leave a lot of room for character development as the scenes fly by so fast.

As for the prose, it's just written in a way you can tell it was written by a younger author. It just doesn't read very smoothly and kind of feels like the "this happened. and then that happened" style of writing. Not quite in that way, but it just doesn't read very nicely. But, again, this is something I know I did in my writing around this age as well. I'm sure that by now Scanio, if they're still writing (not from what I could find) will have improved on this already. Skill comes with time and practice.

So while I know I have some points of feedback for this book, I still applaud Scanio for publishing this and it definitely has quite a few things working for it. The final execution isn't perfect, but I still appreciate it nonetheless.

Rating: 3/5