It seems that I keep returning to the same ideas over and over again. Today I’d like to once again review a book that I almost DNFed, and talk some more about the idea of redemption narratives. The book that inspired this latest round of reflection? The Wolf and The Woodsman by Ava Reid.
This book has come across my social media timelines a few times so I decided to give it a chance, and honestly I don’t know what people saw in this book. I understand that it incorporates some currently popular elements — friends-to-lovers, Eastern European influences, and Judaism in SFF — but I feel like for each of these elements, there are other books that do it better. Instead of reading this book, just look at the comps that are being used to market it, and go read or re-read those instead.
Now, it’s partially my fault that I didn’t enjoy this book. Friends-to-lovers is not my favorite trope, and I need it to be done just right for it to work for me. More on that on a later date — I’m thinking I might do a whole series on tropes in 2022. But my problems with this book extend beyond tropes, because I personally found it to suffer from a lot of pacing issues and weird errors/plot holes. Let’s get into it.
Spoilers from here on out.
The Plot
The Wolf and The Woodsman is marketed as being inspired by Hungarian and Jewish history and legends. Now, I know absolutely nothing about Hungary, so I can’t comment on that. And while I’m not Jewish or any sort of expert on Judaism, I do have enough experience with the religion to be familiar with the stories and holidays referenced in this book, which will come into play later in the review.
Évike, the main character of this story, is the only wolf-girl in her pagan village who doesn’t have magic. All of the other girls have some combination of the ability to light fires, forge metal with their bare hands, or heal injuries. Far more rare is the seer’s ability to receive visions of the future. So when the king’s Woodsmen come to the village to abduct a wolf-girl seer for the king, the villagers hastily disguise Évike and send her off rather than give up one of their actual seers.
The Woodsmen are a holy order dedicated to the Patrifaith, the church of Godfather Life. They get their holy powers by sacrificing parts of themselves. They are dour and cruel and one of them even tries to kill Évike because he disagrees with the king’s desire for pagan magic.
One of the Woodsmen is handsome and brooding. Spoiler, he is also Gáspár, the true heir to the throne! All the other Woodsmen die and he realizes Évike is not a seer so they go off on an adventure to try to find the magic turul bird that could give the king omniscience instead of going back to the village for a real seer.
A quest to find a magic bird might sound exciting, but this part of the book actually drags. It’s incredibly repetitive. Évike and Gáspár ride around on horses. They snipe at each other. She thinks sometimes about how handsome he is, but also how much she hates him. They drift towards each other at night because it’s cold. She regrets that she doesn’t have magic. She thinks about how much she hates the people in her village. He broods. Occasionally, they have a random encounter with a monster, presumably from Hungarian legend, or with a village.
Évike hates the Woodsmen more than most because when she was young, they took away her mother. Because she had no father in the village, she was raised instead by the cruel old seer. We learn eventually that her father was a Yehulie tax collector. The Yehulie are of course the Jewish people. They are not inspired by the Jewish people, their faith and culture is 100% Jewish, copied and pasted into a fantasy world. They have the same language, stories, and festivals as real-world Jewish people, and fulfill a similar economical niche as they did historically in Eastern Europe (ie, money lenders and metalsmiths) and are also persecuted similarly.
We learn that the people in Évike’s village believed, and have lead her to believe, that she does not have magic because she is a half-breed. Yikes.
How and Why This Book Didn’t Work For Me
So let’s get into how this book failed me as a reader.
First, there’s the aforementioned pacing issues. The first half of the book feels incredibly repetitive. I am used to reading novellas and short novels and wishing they were longer. I had the opposite feeling while reading The Wolf and the Woodsman. This book was 300 pages on my ereader and I felt like it probably could have been trimmed down by about 50, because there are so many parts where it feels like there’s no character growth or forward momentum in the plot.
Second, I hated Gáspár as a love interest. I don’t care how cruel his daddy is and how much people favor his bastard brother who has literally been declared a saint. Gáspár is cruel to Évike on a personal level, and he also serves a cruel church that has a history of persecuting the pagans and the Yehulie. He is a tool of the oppressor and he makes a lot of wrong choices throughout the story. I don’t care how handsome he is. Évike, there are other handsome men in the world.
This brings me back to the topic of redemption narratives, and how they are often used in enemies-to-lovers romance plots. Is Gáspár worthy of forgiveness and redemption? Probably. Does he deserve a happy ending? Possibly. Do I believe that he and Évike belong together? Absolutely not! He doesn’t just represent a group who is unkind to people generally like Évike. The group he is part of took her mother away when she was a child. In essence, they made an orphan of her. His religion actively persecutes members of both sides of her family. It’s not a case of a few bad apples. The church is rotten to the core, and the people eagerly witness the humiliation and harm of wolf-girls and Yehulie, and actively call for both to be removed from the country.
I’m not going to say it’s as egregious as a Nazi redemption arc, or a redemption arc for a character who participated in genocide of Indigenous people, because those are real-life historic events and this is fiction. But it leaves a similar taste in my mouth.
Third, I found the copy-and-paste Judaism a bit clunky. To be clear, I think it’s great to include analogs of real-life religions in fantasy, when they’re done respectfully (preferably by someone of that religion) and when they are well-incorporated into the world building. I felt like it might have felt more natural to include the Yehulie if their religious customs and observations felt more influenced by the magic and history of this fantasy world, rather than being pretty much exactly the same to what I know of real-life Judaism (the only noticeable difference being using magic to light candles instead of more mundane means).
There’s some attempt made to draw parallels between Évike and the story of Esther, with people telling her the story and encouraging her to be like Esther, and her drawing inspiration from that in tough times, but I felt like this didn’t really have much of a pay-off. Also for some reason the author moved the celebration of Purim, the festival honoring Esther’s story, to late fall/early winter instead of spring when it’s usually celebrated.
Fourth, after Évike has reunited with her father and been welcomed into the Yehulie community and started to learn their language and how their magic works, she still thinks of herself as having “tainted” blood. I mean… WOW. I realize that she has a lifetime of internalized racism and self-hatred and abuse to work through, but she never even second-guesses herself when she thinks about how she’s tainted. It felt too close to the sort of language real-life racists use when referring to other people and I was really uncomfortable reading a protagonist using it in reference to herself.
Fifth, the narrator refers to both fingernails and teeth as bones. They are not bones. I can understand mistaking teeth for being made of bone, because I was this weekend years old when I learned they weren’t. They look like bones. They’re hard like bones. They age similarly to bones. A person from a medieval culture might think they were bones. FINGERNAILS ARE NOTHING LIKE BONES. This is never going to stop bothering me. On my deathbed, my last words will be “I can’t believe neither of Ava Reid’s editors corrected her when her narrator called fingernails bones.” How did nobody flag that for correction?
I Kind of Hate This Book
I rarely hate books these days. Usually I’m mature enough to recognize that a book simply isn’t for me. But the more I read this book, and the more weird little mistakes I came across (I didn’t even get into the time when Évike had allegedly taken time to change her dress but it made LITERALLY NO SENSE), the more annoyed I got. There were a couple of times when I almost gave up and set the book down, but I fell for the sunk cost fallacy and kept reading. I kept thinking surely, the book would have a good payoff and I would understand why people liked it, but no.
The annoying thing is, it started out strong. The first scene is so evocative. It eventually sets the tone for a magical story with a strong sense of place. But as soon as the Woodsmen arrived, it was ruined for me, and it never recovered.
The thing is, I think this could have been a good book. I think if a strong editor had stepped in and worked with Reid to fix the way the first half drags, and if Gáspár had been less cruel and complicit in the hate crimes of his culture from the beginning, and if the Judaism had been woven in a little better, I would have really enjoyed it. I think The Wolf and The Woodsman either needed to be more historical (the real world + magic, rather than “inspired by Hungary”), or less historical (a true fantasy world inspired by Hungary and Judaism, but clearly distinct from actual history).
Also I never want to read about “tainted blood” ever again unless someone has literally had something dangerous injected into their blood, please and thank you.
FTC Disclaimer: Look, I don’t know why you’d want to click on my affiliate link after reading this review. But if you want to give The Wolf and The Woodsman a chance, or if you click my link but buy something else while you’re there, I will get a small commission. Alternatively, you can go to your local independent bookstore or library. Maybe read The Sisters of the Winter Wood instead.