Another wolf xenofiction that looked interesting to me. Spoilers ahead!
Rhamin is the proud leader of a wolf pack, however he finds himself being constantly undermined by his half-brother, Solin, who wishes to be leader instead. When Rhamin disappears and is presumed dead, his packmember Rasci starts to receive visions where he communicates with humans. Through these visions he figure out that Rhamin might still be alive and held at a zoo. Now he and the human boy he bonded with will have to make a plan to free Rhamin.
It's an okay book, not great but not terrible either. I had a decent enough time read it, even thought I wasn't overly invested in this world or its characters. I think that one reason for this is that I found neither protagonist to be particularly interesting. Rhamin is just kind of your standard noble leader who doesn't have that much else to him, and Rasci, while mildly more interesting due to his powers, still has this very cliché plotline of "talking to a human child" that appears in quite a few wolf books. His chapters I enjoyed more than Rhamin's, but they still just felt so tired and trope-y. It also doesn't help that I find the human characters Rasci ends up bonding with to be pretty uninteresting and bland as well. Particularly Ben and Margo (the two kids) just feel kind of generic kid stock characters who don't really have any flaws or distinct personality outside of "human kid".
However, I do have to say that there was one character I immensely enjoyed, Zelda, the oldest wolf in Rhamin's pack and a seer and mentor figure to Rasci. She was just really neat, I liked how smart she was and how her bond with Rasci was developed and how she was sometimes mentally one step ahead of the rest. She's just a neat character, and I'm glad she didn't end up dying (as usually happens with elderly mentor characters in this type of stories).
I also thought that the character of Lexa was quite interesting, however she is at the same time also a bit of wasted potential. Having a dog who was raised as a wolf seems like a prime opportunity for a unique character who struggles with her identity, but instead Lexa is mostly a side character and her being biologically different from her lupine peers doesn't seem to affect her all that much outside of her being cold in winter.
Another issue I do have with this book is that some scenes just kinda lack emotional impact. For example, there's a scene where Lexa, the dog raised by the wolf pack, learns that she was stolen from her mother by the wolves. You'd think that this would be an emotional and devastating scene for her, but instead she just kinda shrugs it off, is like "okay" and the plot instantly moves on thereafter. Nobody really reacts to what should be for Lexa a world-shattering revelation. There's also a scene where Rhiana, a villainous she-wolf who killed some of Rasci's kin, shows up, and for whatever reason Rasci just doesn't respond super emotionally to this at all, at least not at first. Which again is like, frustrating. These are prime opportunities to insert some character drama into your story, why would you purposefully waste them?
There's also some formatting/grammar issues in this book. There's lots of places where commas are missing, I think I spotted a few missing apostrophes as well. And the author keeps using the word "barring" when he obviously means "baring" (as in, baring teeth). This is a consistent issue and spoiler alert, it carries on into book two. This just was a bit frustrating and feels like it should've had one or two more drafts before publishing.
Overall I wouldn't say this is a bad book, I did still somewhat enjoy myself while reading it. But I'd be lying if I said it was super interesting or unique. I could've done with more interesting protagonists, a less trope-y story, and some more character drama in the moments I mentioned above.
Rating: 3/5
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