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language: English
country: USA
year: 2021
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 18.9.23-4.11.23
I finally finished Ava Reid’s The Wolf and the Woodsman. it was fine. there are many things about the world-building that I liked — it was Finno-Ugric fantasy in a cool way, and also actively Jewish fantasy in a slightly less interesting way. I would say the main problem with it is that it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, which also led to some very weird pacing.
Évike is a pagan from one of the few surviving villages hidden on the fringes of the “Patritian” (i.e., Christian) kingdom of Régország (i.e., Hungary). most of the women of her village have magic; she doesn’t. they send her as a sacrifice to the Patritian king, but things go wildly off the rails and she ends up caught up in complex political machinations, caught between the “good” prince and the “bad” prince. this was a secondary problem: there is simply no reason for Évike to be committed to the monarchy, but she’s constantly needling Gáspár about how the kingship is his birthright and he “should” be king.
Évike and Gáspár go on a quest in search of a maybe-mythical bird, return to the capital for the political machinations, go back out on another quest, and return to the capital again for more political machinations. also Évike is half-Yehuli (i.e., Jewish), so that adds an extra dimension. for a novel where the stakes are consistently very high, it nonetheless...meanders.
it feels like it’s trying to be several different things at once:
these could have worked together, but at times they felt disconnected; Évike being Yehuli, in particular, really felt like an afterthought — this aspect of her character got way less attention, and the Yehuli were much less effectively drawn / developed than the pagans of Ezer Szem.
by virtue of trying to do many different things, the pacing felt very erratic — by the halfway point it really felt like we’d reached the climax of the novel, but then it abruptly kept going and slowed to a crawl before suddenly racing through some important things again.
the characterization, at least, was pretty good, although I would have liked to have a clearer sense of how Évike’s experiences changed her beyond her developing new relationships with new people.
still, with all of that said, it was, on the whole, worth it for the richly-drawn world-building, which was definitely the highlight of the novel.
moods: dark, tense