Making an effort to post a book review every Friday!

The Wolf and the Woodsman

The Wolf and the Woodsman is the debut novel for Ava Reid and I…..I gotta be totally honest with you, this was an impulse purchase of $1. I knew nothing about it and said ‘hey, I’ve spent a dollar on worse things.’

Which maybe isn’t the most flattering way to start a review of a charming story that uses a number of fantasy tropes in order to pull in an audience and then begins to bluntly address religious oppression. I found this book to be a very nice surprise, perhaps aided by how blindly I went into it.

I like this story because I felt it didn’t pull punches. Everyone is somewhat horrible to each other, each group is mired in flaws with outstanding character exceptions.

The fantasy world building is very strongly woven into narrative and plays into a large number of popular fantasy tropes, especially romantic tropes between the titular Wolf-girl, a pagan analogue, and Woodsman, a paladin figure reminiscent of the strict behavioral code of Knights Templar.  The reliance on tropes could be seen as a criticism; I could see a certain demographic brushing this story off as heavy handed young adult fiction, but the story abruptly changed form, for me, as the Yehuli, an analogue for Jewish citizens in Europe, are introduced and explored.

The Yehuli stand in contrast to the Patritian (Christian) and Wolf people/Juuvi/ others mentioned in passing (Pagan) religions.

The fact that each religion explicitly has its own forms of accessing a seemingly universal magic is one of the highlights of the book’s message. The treatment of oral versus book versus nature based religion is fairly well explained and demonstrated. The diversity of characters, the politics that govern the conflict of the story, are refreshingly not limited to two camps but across several social groups which each have their own social structures.  Overall, I felt the book handled what could have been an easily bungled and lofty goal rather delicately. The action sequences and pace of the story is satisfying so that despite being over 400 pages, it’s a quick read.