Book Review: A Wolf for a Spell by Karah Sutton

 

Me and my wolf books. Gotta read 'em all. Spoilers ahead.

Zima is a she-wolf who isn't hasn't been very connected to her pack since her brother has been in charge of it. One day, she is pretty much forced into making a deal with the witch Baba Yaga: They will trade bodies. Now in Baba Yaga's form, Zima winds up in a huge adventure involving a girl named Nadya and the tzar himself. 

This was a pretty good book. I liked it a lot. I do have a pretty big gripe with it (which I'll get to later), but I'll say that just the way the book itself is, it's pretty darn good. Not my favorite book I've recently read, but I found myself getting really invested in the world, the characters and the story.

I think that Zima and Baba Yaga as characters are especially interesting and well-rounded. And there's quite a few good side characters, too, such as Nadya, Katerina and Veter. Even Grom, while not particularly likable, still had a decent arc. So the character writing is definitely a highlight here.

The story was also genuinely interesting with lots of twists and turns, and it never quite had me knowing what would come next. I like it when a story can keep me guessing, so that was great.

If I do have an issue though, it's that this book is being marketed as a wolf xenofiction (aka a story written from a wolf's POV). And if you read the synopsis you might've already figured it out: There is very little actual wolf-POV in this book, since Zima is in Baba Yaga's human body throughout most of it. There are a few brief chapters/snippets with Baba Yaga in Zima's wolf body, but they're few and far between compared to the Zima POVs. 

And I do genuinely love Zima as a character, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't pick up this book to mainly read about wolves. Zima is meanwhile in the form of an old lady for about 80% of the book (if not more). So that was just...kinda disappointing. If you're gonna write a wolf book, write a damn wolf book. But don't deceive your readers into thinking they're gonna read about an animal when they're in fact reading about a human witch most of the time. I did know that there was gonna be some body switching going in based on the premise, but I didn't expect the body swap to last through most of the story.

So like I said, the story itself I think is great. But the fact that this is advertised as a wolf-POV book when there is very little wolf-POV-ing going on feels deceiving and it's just not what I bought this book for. If I wanted to read a fantasy book about witches, I'd have picked up a book about witches, not something with wolves featured heavily on the cover and in the title.

Rating: 4/5