Book 47 of 2022: A Wolf Called Wander
A Wolf Called Wander by Rosanne Parry. The issue with "talking animal" books is usually that the animals aren't animal-ish enough, that they're too human. I never would have guessed that the opposite could be a problem, too.
The wolves in this book really weren't "talking animals", they were mostly just plain wolves. They could talk to each other with very simple language (most of the time they said only things like "Mine!"), though now and then their conversations and thoughts oddly got more complex. The problem with that is it's hard to have much of a plot with only real animals in the real world.
Based on a true story/real wolf, this book told the tale of a wolf whose pack got driven out (or killed) by a larger pack. As the probably sole surviving wolf, Swift (later renamed to Wander) traveled across the land until he found a new home. That's it. That's the whole story.
Some things happened on his trip (he met a raven, he got hurt by an elk, there was a fire), but it really wasn't plot-y at all.
This wasn't a bad book, it was just kind of... there. It was extremely short (even shorter than it seemed, lots of art* and blank pages). After the nonstop excitement of my last book (Stormrise), A Wolf Called Wander just seemed so slow and uneventful. Again, not bad, just maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had read some other book before it.
* Other reviews say the artwork was wonderful, but on my Kindle I really couldn't see much of it.