This one has been on my to-read shelf for a while. Let's finally take a gander. Spoilers ahead.
Luna is a promising young wolf in his pack, though he has a few bullies among his brothers picking on him. When one day a fight between him and one of them goes too far and the bully ends up dead by accident, Luna is blamed for it and is banished from his pack. He now grows up alone. When he is an adult, he comes across more wolves, and starts to question who he really is: Luna, the promising future leader, or Luna, the forever-lone wolf?
A decent book with a decent premise, it just had too much holding it back for me to be able to truly enjoy it. First I'll get to the good elements: Luna is a pretty good character who goes through a neat arc which is well-written. Some of the side characters were also pretty good and rounded, such as Carlin, Toltan and Rajor. I also liked the setup of Luna being blamed for a crime he did not commit, though this is not what the bulk of the story is dedicated to.
But for every good thing there's something here holding the story back from being great. First, let's talk about Luna's friend and, later on, mate Estrella. I felt absolutely no connection between these two. Literally she just shows up on his territory one day despite barely knowing him (she's from his old pack, but both were very young when he was banished) and just claims she wants to be his mate. That just feels so forced I hardly can put it into words.
And worse yet, it works. She becomes his mate in the end and all the while I'm just here struggling to find any romantic connection between these two. They hardly knew one another, Estrella just wanted to be his mate based on a vague memory of Luna because she didn't want to be Rajor's, and somehow this turns into an actual romance despite Luna finding her ungodly annoying at first. Also, me as reader found her annoying as well, which is never a good thing if you want your audience to like this character. When Estrella "died" halfway into the story I felt nothing.
Second, the plot near the climax just becomes weirdly over the top with Luna and his pack leading an attack on some humans. You know, I know, everyone knows, that logically the wolves would lose this and the humans would win. But somehow the wolves win and we're supposed to be glad about it. I'm not too keen on stories where wolves are portrayed as cold-blooded human killers, and this is no exception. I get why they don't like the humans (they kill wolves, of course) but it just feels unrealistic that the wolves would win the war on the humans and real wolves are not this vicious towards them. If anything this type of vicious depiction of wolves in media once more gives wolves a bad rep, and they already have enough of that already.
Next, though this is minor, it really annoyed me how the author kept referring to baby deer as "foals". Those are called "fawns" or "calves", depending on the species. A foal is a baby equine. Just a really basic thing to get wrong.
Finally, I really question the logic of the pet wolves the humans have in this book. Basically, one of Luna's friends, an older wolf named Carlin, lost his pups and thinks them to be dead. Later we are given the revelation that they were caught and raised by the humans, who now use them to hunt with. Which is just...off? First of all, I'm not sure where this takes place (presumably somewhere in the US or Canada), but I am pretty positive you can't just legally take wolves from the wild to raise as pets. Maybe they could be killed for their fur or sold to zoos or whatnot, but to just be kept as pets feels rather unheard of. And they're not kept as exotic pets, either, they're basically treated as dogs by the humans. And if you know anything about wolves including in captivity, it's a fact that wolves do act different than dogs. They're not the same.
To make things even more unrealistic, the humans use their wolves as hunting dogs. Wolves and wolfdogs are not the ideal hunting companions for humans, we have hunting dogs for that because those were specifically bred. You can't just raise a wolf puppy and expect it to be the ideal hunting companion, they still have the wild instincts and aren't fully bred for hunting with humans. Seriously, do a google search for "can wolfdogs be used for hunting" and most answers come up negative. I'm sure it's not out of the question completely and that a pet wolf when raised from birth could be raised to hunt decently, but they're just not ideal for it and this book making it seem like the humans and pet wolves are a perfect hunting unit just feels a bit off.
Overall a decent book but there's just too much holding me back from liking it fully. If you like wolves you might like it, but I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.
Rating: 3/5
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