The Wolf and the Woodsman (Novel Review)

 

#fantasy #romance #religion

"He will never know the stories that live in her marrow and blood.”

I picked this novel up earlier in the year when I was quite badly burned from a camping trip and thought, perhaps, this juicy fantasy would distract me from my cracked lips and peeling burned skin. After I lost interest, I picked it up several months later and powered through to completion, and my god, I have a lot of things to say about this novel.

               First of all, I adored the world-building. My main interest in all fantasy novels is the world that the novel is set in, how everything is interconnected and related to one another and what their inspirations are. The Wolf and the Woodsmen had Jewish-coded fantasy elements, as well as religions and forms of magic that relate to early Christianity and paganism. The variety of magic was impressive, and inspired me for my own novel, especially with how the different magic was especially tied to the belief of the ethnoreligious group. For example, the Yehuli people’s magic was associated with their words and language.

               What annoyed me most about this novel, though, is how much potential this work had. Evike, the relationship, the plot, everything had so much potential that was wasted in the final half of the book. The build-up was worth more than the actual ending, which seemed quite rushed and haphazard.
Ava Reid dropped hints of interesting discussions that could have been exploring more further into the novel but soon forget them a couple of pages later. For example, during the big fight scene, Evike’s father told her about the word for their God, which seemed like it would give her some incredible abilities or mean something later on, but it was quickly forgotten. What I noticed especially, was that the majority of these interesting topics were dropped for the relationship between Gaspar and Evike, which I really didn’t enjoy.

Gaspar and Evike’s relationship could have been some well-written star-crossed lovers, but the banter (even further into the relationship) was lost to cruel jabs that erred on the side of abuse than teasing. Evike lost so much character personality for Gaspar, and Gaspar was completely void of any interesting traits at all.

               What made me enjoy reading this novel was the lyrical quotes that provoked thought. As I pushed myself to read dry relationships and a mean protagonist, Reid was writing something so beautiful that I would have to stop and think about it for a second. These were my particular favourites:

“Can a saint ever be holier than the one who consecrated him?”

“You should know better than anyone that people can be as cruel as any good.”
“It’s not about cruelty. It’s about power, without power all you have is anger and spite. Cruelty comes when you have the strength to turn your anger on someone else.”

These quotes are, for me at least, thought-provoking and beautiful, but were wasted in the novel for a relationship that was dry. 

    I think this novel highlights an issue that is often found in the fantasy genre where writers will often disregard or forget interesting plot points for an enemies-to-lovers relationship. Because of the popularization of that trope via social media outlets such as TikTok and Instagram, these sorts of tropes have been put on a pedestal of good writing and made much easier to market to the younger generations. This quick advertising, finding tropes that are popular for the market of social media rather than the general population, is what's truly slowly killing the fantasy genre, reducing what is meant to be a quite thought-provoking genre into something very mainstream and simplistic. 
    Of course, novels that ignore this trend do get published but they simply do not receive the same level of attention as other novels, making the 'BookTok' and other book recommendation sites into echo chambers of the same novel rehashed with different names and faces.