Promise of the Wolves by Dorothy Hearst
My rating: 3/5 cats
okay, i am going to pretend i am queen of the universe and i am going to set some ground rules, the first of which is that if you are an author, and you publish a book knowing full well it is going to be the first part in the series, you MUST make that EXPLICIT somewhere on the cover. because i can’t go reading a whole book only to find that the resolution is actually a gateway into another whole story, i can’t.
this just made me more aware that donald harington loved sea of poppies and he died before the second and third books in the trilogy were published. this is the saddest thing i can think of, and it makes me confront my own mortality. and i can’t have that, either.
fortunately, i didn’t love this book the way he loved sea of poppies. i expected to like it in a light breezy way, and that’s what it was for me; a light, fun diversion. i mean, who doesn’t love anthropomorphism, right? tailchaser’s song is one of my all time favorite books, and watership down is great etc etc. this one was lacking in the “species-specific language/glossary” that i liked so much in those other books, but it still had some great illustrations of wolf behavior, so i learned a thing or two, and the central character was complex in a good way—not overly heroic or role-modelly; a flawed wolf struggling with her role in her society, and her relationship with the “other”—humans.
and what would a novel be without a poetry-spouting, comic relief raven?
not much fun, that’s for sure.
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