Sometimes I really think I should may be just stop buying books that even vaguely relate to wolves. It often leads to disappointment. Spoilers ahead.
In Australia, two teens called Jake and Lucy go on a quest to find a supposed wolf that's roaming the local nature. Over the course of their journey they grow closer and Lucy starts to process the traumas induced by her abusive father.
Good concept for a story, but the execution was just, I don't know. It's wasn't bad, but it wasn't what I was looking for at all. What I wanted based on the title and cover and premise: a cool journey of these two teens to find a wolf. What I did not want: mostly interpersonal drama and two teens falling in love with the wolf being only an afterthought. The wolf is more so just the inciting incident to get the plot and journey going than being an actual goal. Well, almost.
So like I said, most of the book just focused on the characters and their relationships and drama. If you care about that, good for you, but I wasn't at all invested in these characters. Sure, you feel bad for Lucy because she has an awful home life with her abusive father, but my liking for her character is only because of that. There was nothing to her (or anyone else's) character in this book that really stood out or I liked. The emotional core of the story is Lucy's trauma and her growing to love Jake, but I felt nothing for these characters. Just tacking a sad backstory onto a character doesn't immediately make them memorable or likable. Lucy, Jake and all the people around them: I didn't care about them. Which sucks when your story is so character-focused.
And of course the journey in the end is far less about the actual wolf and more so about giving Lucy and Jake a way to bond and sort out their feelings about themselves and their home life. They definitely go looking for the wolf, but the journey quickly becomes more about them and less about the animal they're looking for. The final payoff (if you can even call it that) was also hugely disappointing.
After years of hearing something howl in this part of nature and several people being convinced that there's a wolf out there, but others thinking it's a feral dog, Lucy finally does come across a canine on her way back from the journey. But she only ever briefly sees it to the point she's still uncertain whether it's actually a wolf, dog or maybe even a dingo. So like, what even was the point of all this buildup to a journey if A) you're going to focus more on the characters during it and B) there's not even any real payoff. At the start of the story we didn't know which was roaming the area, and in the end we still don't know. Just that it's something canine and vaguely lupine-looking.
I don't know, as someone who loves reading journey-stories and also loves reading about wolves, this is just such a huge cop-out. Also, the possibility of it being a dingo is somehow even rarely brought up. Dingoes do somewhat resemble wolves (more than a lot of dog breeds do) and do live in Australia, so the possibility of the "wolf" being a dingo is so much more likely. Yet everyone's convinced that it's either 100% a gray wolf or a feral dog, dingoes are rarely even brought up. Which just seems weird when you're setting your story in Australia. Maybe they're not often found in this specific part of Australia where the story takes place (I wouldn't know), but the idea of a dingo ending up in an unlikely part of Australia is still far more believable than a gray wolf (which doesn't live in Australia) just roaming about like a lot of people here are convinced it is.
So yeah, I don't think this is a bad book per se, it's just a huge letdown. The things it does focus on, the characters, drama and relationships, I didn't think were handled in an interesting way and they just felt dull and boring to me. And the things that really had potential and got me interested in the story were barely even present or touched on. Not one I'll be re-reading in the future.
Rating: 3/5
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