Photo credits: David Mark Edited by Vaishali Title: Dyrwolf Author: Kat Kinney Publisher: Self published Year of Publication: 2018. Genre/Themes: YA Fantasy, Paranormal, Romance, Shapeshifters, War, Dystopian, Chronic Illness Format: E-book (ARC) copy kindly provided by the author Review... We have 16-year-old Lea Wylder as Dyrwolf's lead, a headstrong huntress with a sharp and practical mind for all things woodland and wilderness, but not at all by choice. Two decades prior, the shape-shifting Dyrwolves slaughtered the only human community stationed in the sparsely populated Northern mountains. After rights stolen, a town butchered and their people persecuted, the Dyr commandeered their Colony, forcing the surviving humans to migrate across the river to a village deprived of resource, barely able scrape out a living. From hearty, dense lives to a slight, rough-as-bark existence all in the space of a night that marked their blood, the humans are determined to redeem their land from the beasts that stole from them remorselessly and rained on them a downpour of their own blood. Everything can be blamed on their enemy predators. Carved from the bite of living small and remote only cements their need to take back. They've been gradually building up their forced for a counterstroke and the Insurgents have been since preparing. Lea is most familiar with a modest, unimposing life, living by day from the earth and taught and trained into bedlands competence by her father. The arid, uncompromising conditions might have whittled the townspeople down to grit and bark and a full-sighted call for blood to war against the Dyr, but Lea has always been on the far periphery as the Village's cast off. With an incurable illness that strips her senses and plunges her into depthless pain, she's the whispered-about outsider that has no place among her people. Brought up on stories of the genocide of their people, the names of their stolen worn into the bark of the Gathering Hall, the unforgivable sins of the Dyr are never forgotten and their missing are always remembered. When her best friend's name joins the Carved, it only instills within Lea more reason to despise the wolves across the river. So when she finds an overfamiliar, fair-haired wolf trapped on their land, it's the perfect opportunity to save her friend. If every Dyr has an agenda, she's not above using one to get her way. She's not about to start trusting the enemy, even if he's one and the same, one who crawls the space of her dreams beyond any partition that severs wolf from man. May has been a time of catching up on arc-requested reads. After sitting unread for nearing on eight months, I finally got the chance to catch up on Kat Kinney's Dyrwolf. Kinney commands an inspired story with an original angle on werewolf fantasy, one that cares for an unassumed identity pulled further into crisis for our caustic coming-of-age Lea, a combat for love and bad blood while told narratives drive wedges and war between human resistants and wolf settlers. An interesting us vs. them tale where sequestered sides of a war aren't, after initial presumption, strictly polarised to human and wolf, but geared also towards a shared need for wholesome rights. In other words a mutual intent makes for a story where taking sides comes, not entirely from species segregation but species-wide captivity in this colonised settlement. And it all starts when an adorable fluffy shifter and a tense young girl meet at a junction. It’s that gray sphere where black against white, where evil vs good and human vs wolf isn’t the checkerboard model that’s partitioned down the middle. I'm assuming there's an alternative world backdrop in Dyrwolf. From the bits of history aired along with the environmental impression and lifestyle framework of both the Village and the Colony, there's a threadbare, pre-modern feel that lends itself to what feels like a bare-bones dystopian setting. It is a post-war native homeland, but one that's always circling and readying for another one. With disunity, antagonistic ethic, caste difference, deference to an alpha power, flawed rationale, trickery and kept secrets, this is a world that presents itself in a true-to-life extreme, 'its them or us' fashion. Dyrwolf is a convincing story, characteristic to careful plotting and complex relationships between friends and enemies and all the people with something to fight for or against in between. Without feeling overworked or self-conscious, Dyrwolf opens with a slow-stepping rhythm that might take a slow measure but is still plotted contemplatively, enough for the twists to begin hitting you at the halfway seam, one after the other in a hopeful 'what's to come next'. That was when the story really picked up and occupied the attention that was halfway lacking for me in the initial build up. The first part takes the time to introduce Lea’s life, her burdensome sickness, the Village principles, the deficient land, and her life with her father, also the Village Leader. And when she meets a white wolf under the night sky, it’s then that she confronts the challenge of betraying disclosure - where a different side to a long war is perceptible through clashing sets of eyes. The history and taught bias becomes less morally superficial and more morally questioning. The second part held my favour because it’s where the intimacy of trekking through the wilderness as a twosome with Henrik evolves into open story space and we’re introduced to more cast members and unpredictable intrigue, courtesy of the Colony itself. It’s also when the pace changes up enough to take notice. Through the back and forth of a few rotating emails, the author and myself exchanged some details of the shared struggle with chronic disease for us both. While we each live restricted and homebound for a separate set of reasons, Kinney explained that her severe sensitivity to light and sound leaves her most often trapped in the dark, just like Lea Wylder. And that was where Dyrwolf was born, perhaps in the dark, and where Lea gives a voice to a debilitating variant of migraine disease. With chronic migraine/headache representation, you can expect an inclusive story where unremitting sickness can’t be magicked away with the swipe of a hand or used as a supernatural device to explain away the diehard day by day hardship to just exist. Chroncially ill readers will appreciate the untempered chronically ill realism. Stripped to the bare bones of piercing agony in waves of volleying firestorm where all shades, faces and textures of the world blend to the background and paralysing pain transcends it all, the author so very realistically, finely and expressively strings words over word, over and over again, to sketch an illustration of Lea’s senseless sickness and her lingering struggle. In the felt-more-than-seen hostility and short-sightedness of the villagers, the stigma of difference and being denied equal opportunity to integrate within her community attests to the non-inclusive perception of disability discrimination - that her illness makes her useless and her efforts to belong, pointless. She’s a marked girl for being different in more than just one way, and with the claim of being persistently afflicted naturally shoulders the label of being an outcast. It’s so close-cutting actually that she’s expelled to the outskirts of the village. It tolls the truth bell as it bears the real-life intolerance of being a fringing afterthought to a society blind and hostile to invisible illness. For being misunderstood in something Lea can’t control. Her suffering takes so much from her and the painted prose explicitly, and with an exacting imagination, describes the sensation of being lost to the world by pain - the paradox of pain construed with pressingly beautiful prose. It’s not only what’s been hidden from Lea by her community, her parents and Henrik that keeps her in the dark, but the fear of being blinded and vulnerable by her turbulent health. The chronically ill are some of the strongest warrior-esque survivors on the planet and Lea narrates a heart-hitting perspective with points that sing for the unnamed. The writing is strong and a striking force in describing both the internal mappings of Lea’s feelings and the forthcoming action and even every idle moment between. It takes great writing to blow a breath of felt life into every moment and movement, and in this, I can confidently say that Ms. Kinney verges on pictorial brilliance. At times though, the drawn out fluttery prose and overly used metaphors do disrupt the situational flow, especially in a scene that’s dense with an anticipatory pull. It’s here that the delicate and detailed prose works better in some areas than others. The writing can also lead a reader to get their wires and senses crossed because it’s not strictly easy to mark present from past or present from future. The patchwork of lies, misunderstanding and the bereaved setting works to engage a dark and weary perspective world view. This is after all a survival story. If you’re looking for a sunny-side up quest, this might not be the book for you but as it’s a classified YA, it’s not unsuited for the younger flock of readers. There is a HEA guaranteed but it’s not without losses, persistent misery and anticipated distresses along the way. While there are elements that speak to the YA crowd, the scale, the creative precision and range tells to a dynamic written piece of fantasy in Dyrwolf. Stylistically speaking, Kinney pictures a superb story with picturesque prose that graphically makes vivid the intensity of Lea’s hunt, the discovery within and the revelations without. Stunning attentions to detail, brilliant action sequences, and a story with revealing meaning marks a world where torture touches the brave and ordinary and no one is spared from the power of an alpha. Where a turf war spans decades and in waiting for a revolution. With a vivid set of characters all with something to gain and hide, an intricate social order and intrigue of the political and romantic medley, it’s a fevered time for Lea, and with her coming of age, she staggers from twist to mist in the expanse of the unsung. With a nod to a community of long term, incurable illness and marginalised voices, I give my personal thank you to Ms Kinney for sharing Lea’s story. Extra points for Henrik the fluffy, shaggy ball of fur. I’d brave his thick rug of fur for one eternal hug on any given day because as resonant as Lea is, this book could not have been the same without that fleecy furball with cheek to cheek humour!
I gave this book 4 stars - A big thank you to the author for offering me a copy of Dyrwolf to review! C O N T E N T W A R N I N G: Non descriptive scenes of abuse, torture, whipping and describes blood and injuries. Mentions/implies suicide and child abuse. Also mentions hangings and a past rape in non-explicit terms. Only very few uses of mild profanity. With humans being enslaved and a society of discrimination, bear in mind that there are some strong themes. --------------------------------------- M Y R A T I N G S Y S T E M: ★ - 1 star: I did not like the book ★★ - 2 stars: The book was okay ★★★ - 3 stars: It was a good, solid read ★★★★ - 4 stars: A great book ★★★★★ - 5: A phenomenal read --------------------------------------- I've listed some of my favourite quotes that express and describe Lea's chronic pain really well... ˅˅˅ 'No, despite all the months and years I had trained, despite my skill with a bow and a knife, they hadn’t wanted me because of my headaches, the dark days I puke my guts out from sunup until dusk no matter what I do. As if the fact that I survive constant, unrelenting pain makes me weak. As if any of them could’ve endured a tenth of what I had in sixteen years without crumpling.' 'No one else in the Village has headaches like mine, days of wracking pain and disorientation that after sixteen years have become as much a part of me as my name and my knife. When I was little, we used to talk about finding a cure. But after years of failed draughts, of cold, slimy leeches sucking merrily at my skin while I gagged, of being told to stand on my head for half an hour every morning, to avoid drinking water when the moon is full, and to tie bundles of sticks together and line them up outside the door, I’m through listening to well-meaning advice. Now the question is no longer if they’ll come again, but when.' 'It’s hard to recall how the headaches first started. Time blurs fact and fiction like a painter swirling a brush. In my memories, the headaches are a raven-winged bird watching with beady eyes from the shadows, a fire scorching white hot as a cruel burst of sunlight over water, the sharp agony of a spear piercing behind my eyes until, even before I was tall enough to reach the scarred pine pegs high on the wall where Papa hung his bows, I knew what it was to plead for death. They are an irrevocable part of me, memories woven as tightly into the tapestry of my childhood as the first time I climbed to the top of the Wishing Tree, written in my flesh as indelibly as muggy summer mornings digging for clams in the briny sea air.' 'I rush out into the faint evening light. It’s a race now. I never know just how much time I’ll have. Sometimes I get half an hour before my vision goes gray as a winter sky, lights up with jagged streaks like a storm roaring out over the water, or fades until only a tiny strip of light remains directly over my nose. Other times there’s no warning. Only the sudden blinding burst of a star shattering in front of me, so bright it’s like staring directly into the sun, fractal fissures streaking out in rainbow zigzags as I try not to gag. During the worst attacks, I get only minutes, and am left in a world devoid of light. The smaller headaches I ward off with willow bark. Sometimes I just throw up for a few hours. But then there are the ones where I’m lost to the world for days.' 'There are as many shades to fear as there are hues to the sea. The terror of a little girl who knows somewhere, out in the night, the wolves lurk, their voices always calling, wanting to take her back. The chill deep in the marrow of your bones the day you understand there are some evils from which you cannot escape, no matter how fast and far you run. And worst of all, the crushing panic that comes the moment your defenses have been stripped away. When you are laid bare. When you are the struggling rabbit you have held countless times under the point of your knife, its heart thumping in frenzied terror, eyes wide with panic. When there is no way to prevent your captive from getting free. When all there is left to do is hope you will be shown the mercy of any other kill. That it will be quick.' 'Inside my skull, sheets of flame rage high as the sky. Claws rake my scalp, fire scorching the savaged remains of my memory. Again and again, the unseen witch curls her gnarled fingers through my hair, shreds of charred skin and crisped flesh peeling away like strips of bark as I silently scream.' 'But if the Dyr think this is how they will break me, they have sorely miscalculated. For all their efforts, no wolf can ever replicate with a cane or a stick or a club half the punishment my body conjures for itself every day. Not the boiling poison swirling beneath my skull, or the knives twisting deeper behind my eyes as I try to fitfully sleep. Pain is as much a part of me as breath or blood or bone. Pain is something I know how to survive.' F A V O U R I T E Q U O T E S: When I was old enough to sneak out on my own, I would slip into my boots, latch the door carefully behind me, and run. Run until I couldn’t feel anything but me beneath my skin. Run until I could forget that I was tainted, that there was something poisoning my blood. Run until the endless spray of stars was kissed by the first streaks of pink in the morning sky, calling me home. But this is no different from that day in the square when every chin had lifted as I’d spoken the names. The day every person here had made the choice that being powerless to stop an evil in that moment did not mean you lowered your eyes, did not mean you looked away. Could fates ever be changed? Were futures written like a map of stars, the lives we would live, the people we would love? A lifetime of mistakes to make, kisses to share, and sunsets to witness under brilliant color-soaked skies before one day, it all came to a quiet, inevitable close? Was there any point I could have turned back? Or had the universe known from the moment I became sinew and bone, wolf and girl, that this was to be the night I returned to dust? It’s the reason I weave through miles of forest every month to get down to the coast and that wide stretch of unencumbered sky, the only salve for the secret sickness no one can ever find out about, even if I’d never truly understood what it was about the freedom of running, the open sky, or the stars that made me whole. There are some questions that should never have to be answered. Why do some heal from sickness, while others don’t survive? How could a little girl be cursed with an ailment so devastating, so consuming, it leaves her immobilized with pain for days? No, some things are far too fine to be glimpsed for more than a breath. A sunbeam skittering off dark, smooth river rocks. The moon illuminating the forest floor in rare silvered light. The first white burst of a snow drop unfurling its petals at the start of spring. Things that must be acknowledged in the moment because their time with you is fleeting. Things like Eden Wylder. A half-century of secrets built upon lies. The answer to what had happened to the wolves. And two sides with little reason to trust the other, only a dark, cold corner of the world we both fiercely loved. What can a child so young comprehend of this? Is there any hope of a coalition succeeding when the wolves are taught from birth we are nothing but animals? On the human side of the square, a strange hush has fallen. There is no milling about, no whispers to a neighbor. Every face turns towards ours. A chill goes down my spine. How many out there have suffered a similar fate, been shackled in the stocks, drenched with buckets of filthy water, denied food, tied down, whipped? Reminded each and every day that they are powerless. “Lea, wait.” I grit my teeth. On his tongue, my name swirls like a wisp of fog rolling in off the sea. Curls delicately around the dark-spired treetops lining the coast. It is a way no boy in the Village has ever said it. Not to the girl who screams in the night. The girl who hoards arrows and knives. The girl they believe is possessed. And now he’s got a stupid smirk to match, one he’s trying so hard to hide it’s creasing the left corner of his mouth. Something about this makes me want to run out into the woods and scream. Wolves should not be allowed to have dimples. “I’m not an idiot, Lea,” he says dryly. “And you’re not as sneaky as you think.” “How did you know?” I demand. “Wolf,” he reminds me, reaching over to flick the tip of my nose. “All the better to smell you with.” I glare, watching the corner of his mouth twitch suspiciously towards a smile. “I wasn’t running. I was getting my bow so I could do something about our little bear problem. Not all of us can transform into an overgrown dandelion at will.” He glares. “I am not a dandelion.” “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Ferocious Barking Snowball.” He shows me his fangs. I bare mine right back, unimpressive as Lea-fangs might be. “Just so you know, you’re kind of cute when you snarl. Like a pissed-off little wolverine with its fur all ruffled.” I scowl. “Is that supposed to be a compliment in wolf?” The corner of his mouth twitches. “I said a cute wolverine.” I throw a twig at him. “Someone has a lot to learn about girls.” Henrik flicks the twig back. “Why are we fighting?” “Because you sat on me.” “He’s a very protective wolf.” “Sat. On. Me.” Henrik’s lip quirks as he holds out his good hand. “C’mon, wolverine. Let’s get out of these leaves.” “You want to know if I have a boyfriend?” “Yes,” I deadpan. His grin widens. “Well, I don’t, as it happens. Or a girlfriend.” “You actually bother with courting? The Dyr?” “Oh sure. It’s a bit different than in the human sense. Wolves aren’t quite so hung up on rules and,” he clears his throat, smiling over at me, “colonial standards of propriety.” “Whatever. All I can say is, the next time I see you, you’d better be wearing pants.” “Will your wolf know I’m not trying to hurt him?” “Probably.” “Will he bite me?” “He usually likes pretty girls. I’d say your chances are good.” I scowl at this, and the corner of Henrik’s mouth twitches. I am fast, not strong, bold if not always wise, and many days, so sick I cannot crawl from my bed. But anyone in the Village will tell you I am ten times as stubborn as the worst of our goats. And if I decide my wolf is not going in the river, that wolf is not getting his dainty little toes wet. Henrik chuckles. “Oh, Lea. So much to learn about wolves. Growling only makes us like you more.” I chew sullenly, doing my best to glare. His breath warms the shell of my ear. “Did you swallow it?” I nod. “All of it?” Nod. “Are you going to bite me if I move my hand?” Nod. He chuckles. “That’s my girl.” His hand drops. To his credit, Henrik doesn’t hesitate. “Maybe not right away. But we hope to make things right.” “How? You can’t give back time.” “No.” Henrik’s gaze is unwavering. “There’s no way out of this but forward.” I scoff. “Easy for you to say. Why shouldn’t we burn it all to the ground, every last building, fishing boat, book, ear of corn, and bolt of cloth? Get rid of everything we’ve been fighting over all this time and start over fresh. Because I don’t believe for a second that things will ever be fair, not for those of us who’ve been on our knees all this time, down in the dirt.” I love interacting with fellow readers, reviewers, bloggers and writers. Hearing about reader opinion is the fuel to my reader appetite, so get in touch and comment below! SHARE ON FACEBOOK L E A V E A C O M M E N T A N D L E T' S T A L K A B O U T |
VaishaliBorn in the UK Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
2019 Reading Challenge
Vaishali • [Vicarious Living] has
read 15 books toward
her goal of
30 books.
hide
2020 Reading Challenge
Vaishali • [Vicarious Living] has
read 1 book toward
her goal of
20 books.
hide
2021 Reading Challenge
Vaishali • [V.L. Book Reviews] has
read 1 book toward
her goal of
10 books.
hide
2022 Reading Challenge
Vaishali • [V.L. Book Reviews] has
read 0 books toward
her goal of
5 books.
hide
2023 Reading Challenge
Vaishali • [V.L. Book Reviews] has
read 0 books toward
her goal of
5 books.
hide
DisclaimerAll images of book covers on this site belong to the authors and publishers of the books.
|