Book #4

Through Wolf's Eyes, by Jane Lindskold

I have several fantasy series that I am interested in, and over the last year or so I've picked up the first installment in some of them. Unfortunately, thanks to Robert Jordan, Diana Gabaldon, Stephen King and George R.R. Martin, I am always a little leery of starting a series that isn't actually finished yet; you never know when the author might stall and fail to publish the next book for years -- or even die before finishing the last book, dammit. So these first books are starting to pile up a bit, and many of them are by authors who I've never read, so there is another layer of both curiosity and slight nervousness.

But it's a new year! Full of possibilities and opportunities, and it is a man's duty and privilege to grab as many as practicable and hug them to his bosom. Or something like that. So I grabbed one that has been winking at me from the bookshelf for months, Through Wolf's Eyes by Jane Lindskold. The series is about a young girl who is raised by wolves until she is about 15, and then she is found and brought back into human society. The twist is that she might actually be a long-lost princess, and she is found and returned to her birth parents' home country because she is useful as a political pawn, since the country is going through a succession debacle. The king's children have died; he disowned the youngest, who set out to found his own colony in the deep wilderness. The colony was killed by a fire, leaving only this one girl alive; she has no memory of her human family, but is the right age to be the disowned prince's daughter, the king's granddaughter, which would give her a better claim to being the heir to the throne than any of the king's other candidates, his nieces and nephews and their children. So she gets thrown into all of this political intrigue, but fortunately, the skills and morals she learned living in a wolf pack give her an advantage in dealing with human political machinations.

That's the pitch, anyway. The book is actually quite a bit broader in scope; very little of it is about Firekeeper (that's the girl's wolf name, since she was the only wolf who could use flint and tinder and make fire) and the possibility of her becoming the crown princess. There's a lot of political maneuverings among the other candidates, and Firekeeper throws a wrench in the works, but there is just as much time spent on Firekeeper's attempts to learn to act like a human, and more spent on a war that erupts between this country and two of its neighbors. So again, as with so many others, the back of the book lied to me. I wonder if that's simply unavoidable, particularly in the world of epic fantasy.

On the plus side, it is a good epic fantasy. The characters are great, the political maneuverings are more interesting than not; there is really only one distasteful character, though some of the more minor characters would be distasteful if they were focused on, and that might happen in the later books of the series -- there are seven or eight now, judging from the list inside the front cover. The war was a bit iffy, since this author is clearly not a military person, but the animal/human interactions were great, as were the romantic entanglements -- very realistic, not overdone. The writing was mostly good, with only a few bad habits that might be first-novel jitters and inexperience. It was a little long, but then, that's epic fantasy; she needed to go back and explain some of the history of the monarchies of the several countries, along with a little geography, a little history of magic, etc. None of that stuff overwhelms; mainly, this book is a good story. I liked it, and I'll get the next one in the series.