Time for book two! Spoilers ahead!
In this book we follow the antagonist of book one, the Wise Wolf, and see his backstory. We meet him as a puppy named Hereth, who is a seer and is banished from his family at an early age after the loss of his brother. He grows up and comes across a group of wolves called the Howling Dawn, as well as an old friend from his former group. He learns that the Howling Dawn has a spirit gate, however the spirits pass him a message which terrifies Hereth: There is a curse upon his name and any wolf who knows it will die. Hereth now has to grapple with this fact, and also has to deal with the sinister Varrick, who leads the Howling Dawn and doesn't have good intentions.
This was a neat second installment/prequel to A Wolf Tells Lies! I did have my gripes with book one (it felt a bit mean-spirited and fell into a few problematic tropes), but I did enjoy it to an extent nonetheless. This book however, I do consider a big step up from book one!
I think in large part is also down to the main character: I simply enjoy Hereth/Wise Wolf a lot more as a main character than Wulfur from book one, who was just really abusive and unpleasant to read. We did also have Elite in book one, thankfully, but Wulfur's POV did take up a solid portion of the book. However, Hereth here is a very interesting guy to read. He's not perfect by any means, don't get me wrong, but I didn't find him as unpleasant a POV to read as with Wulfur.
Hereth is also just well-written, his arc makes perfect sense into shaping him who he is. So he was definitely solidly written. I also quite liked the side characters here, such as Imelda, Isinor, Kael and Zehrakai. I feel that all of them were written quite well (especially Imelda, who is basically our deuteragonist) and they all have distinct personalities to set them apart. Varrick was also an intimidating villain for Hereth to face, so I liked him (as a villain, of course) as well!
The plot also consistently kept me engaged this time around and I liked that this book never quite had me knowing where things were going next. It kept me on the edge of my seat while reading and kept me guessing, and I like when a book can do that.
I guess if I have to pick out a negative, it is that I'm not super sold on the world-building (mostly the lore of the spirits and such) of this series yet, but honestly that could also just be a me-thing. I sometimes take a while to warm up to world-building and the lore of a series. It's not poorly-written by any means, I just personally haven't really gotten into it yet. But that's fair, this also happens for other xenofictions for me (like, it also took ages for me to warm up to the lore of Watership Down, which is basically held as the gold standard of xenofiction).
Overall I just think that this is a pretty solid second entry! Not my favorite xenofiction, but a huge step up from book one!
Rating: 3.5/5
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