Apparently there's another wolf xenofiction series out there called The Wolf Chronicles. This annoys me. Dorothy Hearst did it first. Ah well, that doesn't mean I'm not willing to give this other series a chance. Spoilers ahead.
Our unnamed wolf protagonist and his sister grow up in a wolf pack and travel to the ocean with their parents. But when their pack is attacked, the two siblings are separated from their parents and now have to survive on their own.
This was overall a story that I think works in concept but kind of just fails in the execution. The biggest issue for me, however, was just how incredibly bland it felt. It just kind of feels like every wolf xenofiction book ever with not a lot of depth or nuance or interesting aspects to it.
There are factually incorrect things in this book, but that honestly didn't even bother me that much. I don't need my xenofiction to be 100% accurate to the real animal, especially if it leads to interesting stuff in the story.
But the rest of this book was just so...bland and dull and forgettable. Take, for example, our characters. They all just kinda feel like blank slates with little to no personality to them. If you were to ask me to name three traits of characters like our protagonist or White-Ears or Notch-Tail I really wouldn't be able to list much of anything outside of generic terms like "good" or "looks after their sibling/mate". But these characters overall just feel flat and forgettable.
It also doesn't help that almost nobody in this book has a name. Major side characters often don't have names, heck, even the protagonist has none. I think there's only like three named wolves in the entire book (White-Ears, Notch-Tail and the protagonist's older sibling whose name I forgot). And this is just frustrating because it really does create a bit of a barrier between the reader and the characters, which is already there because the characters in question are so bland.
But it's definitely made worse by the fact that the characters don't have names. What do you think would leave more of an impact, the sentence "my gray-furred son died" or the sentence "Graypelt died." Graypelt just being a random name I decided to choose for this otherwise nameless character. You instantly just feel more of a connection to the character once they have a name. And a ton of characters in this book just don't have one and are only described using their appearance.
Another thing that felt bland and forgettable was the story. It honestly doesn't even feel much like a story. The best way I could describe the plot is "wolves doing wolf-y things". They travel, they play, they howl, they meet strangers, they hunt, they mark territory, they look for one another, that's kind of the gist of it. But there's just not a lot to it. The plot eventually becomes about the protagonist trying to re-unite with his sister White-Ears (and to a lesser extent still his parents), but then the book just ends pretty unceremoniously without much of a revelation to this quest. And yes, I know this is a first book in a series. But usually even installments in a series will have somewhat of a conclusive ending (or at least conclude a few subplots) to not feel totally open-ended. But that wasn't the case here. We don't get to see White-Ears or the parents again, it just ends with the protagonist and his mate howling near the ocean and that's kind of it. What a disappointing ending for a first book. Not exactly one that made me want to check out future installments.
If I do have something positive to say about this book, it's that I really do like the relationship between the protagonist and White-Ears. They are together for a large portion of the book and they have good interactions and just feel like realistic siblings to me. They do care about one another a lot, but they're also not above annoying the other from time to time. I don't know, out of the entire book this is really the only aspect that stood out to me. So I was all the more sad we never get to see White-Ears again after her separation from the protagonist.
Overall I guess I'd just describe this book as a bit of a "nothingburger". I've definitely read worse books, don't get me wrong. But this story just felt so bland and forgettable and the characters felt so bland and forgettable that I just feel I got nothing out of it. The only thing I genuinely liked here, again, is the relationship between our two main siblings. But even that's not good enough to recommend one check out this book.
Rating: 2/5
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