This one looked pretty interesting to me, so I gave it a read. Spoilers ahead.
We meet Kavishar, a young wolf raised by an eighteen-year-old who believes he is a dog. When his master Luc moves to a city, Kavishar soon finds himself uncomfortable and at odds with the local dog population. Once he learns of his true nature, he falls into somewhat of an identity crisis. What follows is an emotional journey where he matures and learns who he really is.
This is a good concept for a book, one I really would like to explore more often. Rarely do we see a book where a wolf gets raised as a pet and is it actually written rather realistically, in the sense that the wolf (mostly) acts like a real wolf and actually has trouble adapting to all sorts of aspects of human life and the fact that he is a pet. So I appreciate the book for that.
But for everything this book does right there's also a bunch of things it does wrong. Or just not very good. First of all, despite the author insisting on the canine behavior being as realistic as possible (with a few minor exceptions to allow for anthropomorphizing), the author still uses the tired and outdated alpha-beta-omega dominance theory to depict her wolf/dog packs. Which would've worked for a book which came out long ago, but this book is like ten years old, when this theory was already long-debunked.
I really want to praise the author for most other aspects of the canine behavior here, because she clearly did her research and the behavior here actually feels really realistic at most instances even if the characters are to a level anthropomorphized, but this use of a theory despite her claiming to have done a lot of research and even having consulted wolf centers just feels a bit careless and like she did research, or at least not enough research. Especially when she's trying to be very realistic with her canine behaviors. Feels a bit sad because otherwise I think this is to this date one of the best anthropomorphized canine books I've read when it comes to portraying realistic behaviors.
The characters are honestly quite good. Kavishar makes for a good, rounded fish-out-of-water protagonist who goes through a real arc of becoming a true "Varroul" (wolf) and maturing a lot. I also like Tosha, a particularly brave rat, and Chazameck, Kavishar's elderly husky mentor and another one of Luc's pets. While Chazameck is pretty static as a character, he is still likable for just how incredibly loyal he is to Kavishar even when literally everyone else in the universe seems to be against him. Chazameck isn't perfect, though, but it's nice for him to be fully with Kavishar on pretty much all fronts.
As for characters who were still decently written but I wasn't as fond of, there's Kaemos, the alpha of the dog pack who hates Kavishar. He just feels like an over the top villain with not much to him. He has a sad backstory that his mate died, but that's kind of it. He also might be insane but again he's not very interesting.
Luc, the owner of Kavishar and Chazameck, was honestly one of the worst characters to read about. Not because he was poorly written (he does feel realistic), but because he's genuinely just an unlikable prick. First he illegally takes a wolf pup from the wild and raises it as a pet to the point it could realistically never fit into wild life anymore. Then he moves to the city and forces his wolf (who clearly does not belong there) to adapt. When that doesn't work, he resorts to physical abuse, abuse which doesn't even serve any purpose (not that if it did it would excuse anything) because Kavishar doesn't understand why he's being punished. It's not until the end that he comes around to letting his wolf go, and even then he's such a stubborn ass who hasn't learned his lesson that he decides to get a new wolfdog and forcing it into the exact same city life as Kavishar. What an unlikable idiot.
There's also the animals at the zoo Kavishar ends up with, Daccus, an older wolf brought in from the wild, Naimiree, a love interest for Kavishar, and Yantee, an older coyote. They are again decently written but god they're just hard to stomach sometimes. Daccus and Naimiree are in an abusive relationship, yet they stay together in the end and the story seems to think it's somewhat okay. To the point it doesn't even make much sense that Daccus chooses to stay with his mate in the zoo in the end, because he clearly doesn't like her and longs to go back to the wild. He has an opportunity to escape, and then suddenly after constantly complaining about being captive he decides to remain a zoo animal after all, just to stay in his relationship with Naimiree where he abuses her. Kind of messed up especially since Kavishar seems to just accept it in the end. No, Kavi, abusive relationships are never okay, no matter what justification you try to give it.
As for Yantee, I honestly liked her at first. She was teasing Kavishar a lot, but clearly made attempts to befriend him, but he promptly ignores her. Eventually once Kavi realizes he stands no chance of being with Naimiree he she proposes they be mated together as a hybrid pair, to which...Kavishar reacts with such utter disdain I was really taken aback. Yes, Kavishar is actually very very racist against coyotes and against mixed-species pairs. Which just made me really feel for Yantee, the remarks Kavishar makes about her are absolutely not okay and honestly you'd expect Kavishar, a constant victim of anti-wolf racism by the dogs around him, to be more compassionate?
But nope. So this part of the story really made Kavishar hard to root for, and he never changes his ways, either. He's just massively racist against coyotes and mixed-breed pairs and we're supposed to accept that. Worse yet, after this part of the story Yantee is endlessly villainized as she dislikes him after the horrible remarks he made towards her. And honestly I'm with her at this point. Why would I be rooting for the racist as fuck wolf if there's a much more likable coyote right beside his pen? Not to say that everything Yantee did was okay, either, but I still felt far more sorry for her during the zoo chapters than I did for Kavishar. He's revealed to be a massive racist at this point so I genuinely didn't give a shit anymore if he was miserable at the zoo or not. Serves him right for being a bigot who approves of abusive relationships and being a racist clown.
So overall the characters are mixed in likability (Kavishar and Luc included), but they're at least well-rounded and flawed, so I will praise them for that. The book has more flaws though. For one, the pacing is just slow, especially in some action scenes, which makes the book feel bloated. This is not a short book, at nearly 500 pages, and I really feel it could've been a bit shorter. Again, especially in the action scenes. There's a few, such as the zoo escape or the final fights with Kaemos, where the characters just keep on talking back and forth when these are supposed to be fast-paced and intense action pieces. They just don't feel that way, they feel slow and like they drag. So the pacing could've used some more work and especially the action scenes needed less dialogue and back-and-forth, and more actual action in order to not feel painfully slow.
Finally, I'm not too fond of the ending. For the book having mostly realistic canine behavior (alpha theory notwithstanding), the ending implies that Kavishar, at this point a heavily injured former pet wolf, will be okay in the wild. You, I, your grandma, everyone knows that that just isn't how it works. Kavishar is also all alone in the wild without a mentor, so it's not like he has a lupine teacher to teach him how to survive.
Also, the story ends with the lovely implication that Kavishar is going to be in an incestuous relationship with a wolf pup he adopted once she grows up. Not very comfortable to imply. "But realism," you say. First of all, despite what the author claims in that paragraph, wolves don't just get together with adoptive pups they raised of the opposite gender (for a real life example, see wolf number 8 from Yellowstone, who actually adopted a litter of a she-wolf whose mate died but ended up mating with none of them). Second, while realistic, the animals in this book to an extent are still anthropomorphized, so the idea that they have no concept incest for adoptive relationships doesn't make sense. Kavishar is pretty much adopted by Chazameck, yet he strictly sees their relationship as a familial one as nothing more. Why would this be any different for the she-wolf pup he ends up adopting? If anything their relationship would likely be just another mentor-apprentice or father-son (or in this case, father-daughter) dynamic like Kavi's and Chazemeck's was. So kind of a yikes implication to leave the story off of especially since it doesn't contextually make much sense.
So overall this is a book I to an extent enjoyed reading, but I just have too many qualms with it to call it good. I'll praise it for an overall pretty realistic depiction of canine behavior and some well-written, rounded characters, but opposite of that is the bad pacing, alpha theory, and the unrealistic ending. I'm sure some people can enjoy it, and I did to an extent, but overall it's just not very good.
Rating: 3/5
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