Oh wolf xenofiction, I can never get enough of you. Let's take a look at this one. Spoilers ahead.
Blood Warrior is a black wolf born in his pack, however at a young age he loses many of his family members to other predator animals and eventually another wolf pack. Being the only remaining wolf of his pack, Blood Warrior sets out to form a new pack and eventually get revenge on his enemies.
Gosh, this book sucks. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, but man, this ain't good. Most of it can be chalked up to one thing: The abysmal structure this book follows.
This does not feel like a flowing story. It just feels like a grocery list of events the characters have to go through. The book can easily be split up into three parts: In part one, Blood Warrior grows up and loses his family to his enemies, in part two, he's on his own and tries to form his own pack and prepares to get his revenge, and in part three, he's now fully grown and takes down his enemies one by one in a very boring fashion. Seriously, he wins every fight he starts with his enemies without too much fanfare. It's boring and un-engaging as fuck.
The characters also feel very, very boring. Blood Warrior is a very bland protagonist, his love interest exists just to be a love interest and nothing else, Valor goes through a super-predictable arc of becoming brave and powerful, Red Fang is a one-note one-dimensional villain who abuses his minions, etc. Nothing here feels particularly well-developed, it's all very surface level with not a lot of depth or unique twists to common tropes.
I also hated how ableist this book is. Seriously, it treats wolves who are mentally disabled as lesser and constantly talks down on them. The book is also very mean towards children who are the result of incest, something said offspring can do nothing about and are completely innocent of. Basically, Red Fang (the evil pack's main leader) inbred with his family and this led to a bunch of offspring who are mentally disabled (the book uses much harsher and less politically correct words to describe them) and follow his orders blindly and aren't even given names a lot of the time.
And the book, including the author's narration, treats these characters terribly over it. It calls them outdated terms, and doesn't seem to even see them as real people (or wolves, in this case). I can only imagine the message this is sending to actually mentally disabled people and/or offspring who are the result of incest. The book is also sexist to a degree, but it's by far not as bad as how it treats its disabled/incest-offspring characters.
So yeah, I really didn't like this one. I don't outright hate it (I have read much worse) but it was still a very unpleasant read. Apparently this trilogy never got past book one (I can't to seem to find any books two or three online, at least) and maybe that's for the better.
Rating: 2/5
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