I really liked Hunter's Moon by the same author, so let's see if I like his wolf book as well. Spoilers ahead.
Athaba is a wolf who has never truly fit in with his pack. One day, he is banished and becomes an outcast. He eventually finds a mate and they have pups, but soon Athaba is ripped away from his home by a hunter. Circumstance ends up stranding him hundreds of miles away from his newly formed pack, with nobody but the hunter who took him for company, both stranded in unknown territory. Athaba and his new human friend will have to travel long if they want to find home.
While I really liked the author's fox book, this one was rather lacking by comparison. I hesitate to call it outright bad, but it also wasn't very good and I did find this one a great deal more boring than Hunter's Moon.
A huge issue for this book personally is the main character for me. I just did not care about Athaba as a character. I did not relate to him at all, nor did I find him an interesting protagonist. And if you want to make your reader care about your character you kinda gotta do at least one of the two. It also doesn't help that in a huge portion of this book Athaba is just alone so we're left with no other characters to distract from him (aside from Koonama the human, but he doesn't talk nor does he have much that much to him).
Honestly in general I found the character writing overall to be on the weaker side in this book, which is strange because I really praised Kilworth for his characters in Hunter's Moon. They felt fully realized and three-dimensional, whereas the ones here are either uninteresting, flat or one-note. The only one I could truly get into was Athaba's mentor Raghisthor, but he dies pretty early on and after that I didn't get really into any of the characters.
Another thing is that the plot gets pretty monotone after a while as most of it is just Athaba's journey to get home. Yes, there are a few side events and distractions along the way, plus an introduction and ending where he isn't journeying, but most of the book is just Athaba alone (or with his human) traveling and it gets old pretty quick. The only remotely interesting thing is his growing relationship with Koonama, but even that ends pretty abruptly when Koonama is taken back to human society and Athaba is left alone. Koonama does return a few times later in the book, but it's super brief. I will say that the conclusion to their arc was kind of satisfying, but it's not much after such a boring slog of a journey.
I also just gotta say there were an obnoxious amount of typos in this. Not just one or two, but I spotted quite a few. Maybe it's just my edition that has this, but I still paid money for this and there really shouldn't be this many.
Overall this was just not it for me. Too boring, too long, not enough interesting characters, an unappealing society the wolves live in, and one too many typo's. It's not outright bad, either, but far from truly being good.
Rating: 3/5
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