Book Review: Ilvie and the White Wolf by Kristina Magdalena Henn

 

  Note: This book isn't available in English (yet). The original title reads Ilvie under der Weiße Wolf.

Impulse buy from a bookstore in Luxembourg. Spoilers ahead.

Ilvie is a girl who, against her will, moves from Berlin to a small village with lots of nature around it after her parent's divorce. At first she hates this new life, but after bonding with a wild white wolf she slowly starts to come around to it, especially when she and one of her new friends, Luke, start to work together to protect the wolf against farmers trying to hunt it. Will they be able to protect Ilvie's lupine friend?

Overall this is just a fine book, nothing amazing really, but also not terrible. My biggest issue with it is that it is just painfully generic and pretty much goes in every direction you can imagine if you've watched or read a few other "child befriends wild animal"-type pieces of media. Ilvie is also just a pretty generic protagonist whose arc is just as predictable as the rest of the story. I wish the story didn't play itself so safe and took some actual risks, but it never really does. It's just a very by-the-books tale.

Another issue I have is that, despite this book being supposedly set in a realistic setting of Germany, it does have a few aspects that are just really hard to buy. Like, why is the wolf white? There are no wild white wolves in Germany, and this wolf isn't an escaped zoo animal or anything. I don't know why they had to go for an Arctic'/Hudson Bay/tundra/another subspecies that can be white, when Eurasian wolves are the only species living in the wild in Germany, and those are agouti gray, not white. Logic isn't our friend here.

Another plot point is that the wolf was actually taken from the wild, hand-reared by Grandpa, and then successfully released back into the wild without any fanfare, which again is just so unrealistic. You can't just release a wild animal that was raised captive into the wild and hope it survives, most of the time that won't work out at all. It doesn't have the skills it needs to survive, the skills it would normally given by their parents had they lived in the wild. The she-wolf just magically manages to survive and live like a normal wolf in the wild despite how ridiculously unlikely this is. Again, I wouldn't mind all this if the story hadn't been otherwise realistic, but since it isn't it is harder to suspend one's disbelief. 

Ah well, despite my criticisms the story isn't terrible, either. I honestly quite enjoyed Luke as a character, and Grandpa's arc was pretty nice as well. But aside from that the novel is just so painfully generic as far as the "kid befriends wild animal" genre goes. I just wished for a little more.

Rating: 3/5