Book Review: The Journey of Blood Warrior by William H. Joiner Jr.

 

You ever wanted to read a bad wolf xenofiction? No? You ever wanted to read the same bad wolf xenofiction twice but in very slightly different versions? This is the book for you. Spoilers ahead.

Blood Warrior is a young wolf whose pack gets wiped out by various other predators and a villainous wolf pack led by Red Fang. Blood Warrior grows up, founds his own pack, and now sets out on a quest for revenge against those who killed his family as a pup.

Okay, so, attentive readers of this blog might notice that this synopsis and the title of this book are very familiar. That is because this book is essentially a reboot of the book The Revenge of the Timber Wolf by the same author, this one being written two years after the OG book. And you'd think that, with some time passing, the author would improve on the initial novel a bit. Yeah, that's not the case.

The Journey of Blood Warrior is honestly just as bad as The Revenge of the Timber Wolf. It also doesn't help that they're basically the same book, twice. Yeah, little to nothing about the plot, characters, etc. has been changed. So this begs the question: What is the point in rewriting it in the first place?

This book just suffers from the same problems as the OG does. Rampant ableism and offensive treatment of characters who are the offspring of an incestuous relationship, boring and bland characters, a ridiculously overpowered protagonist, boring villains and an abysmal story structure which feels more like a grocery list of plot beats to hit rather than an actual flowing story.

This book is also being marketed as being for a young audience, unlike The Revenge of the Timber Wolf. However, I would argue that this is honestly false advertising, because this story still contains a lot of mature elements. There's quite a bit of swearing, a lot of violence and death, incest, cannibalism and rampant ableism. Most of these don't feel like they belong in a children's story, at least to me. 

So yeah, skip this one. I honestly don't even know why the author wrote this book twice instead of writing the promised sequel to the OG that never ended up happening (so far). 

Rating: 2/5