Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves (Meg Long)

Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves
Meg Long
Wednesday Books
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Sena has lived all her seventeen years on the icy, storm-wracked world of Tundar - and spent the last five desperately trying to leave. It was bad enough when her mothers were alive; one of them was a proper Corporate Assembly citizen like most in the planet's only true city, the Ket, but the other was a "scavver", one of the feared and frowned-upon people whose ancestors defied corporate rule and fled to live in the wilderness. But they're dead now, killed in the annual race to the world's rich exocarbon deposits, which are only reachable during the planet's brief winter, and - thanks to technology-destroying ion storms - only by the low-tech means of sleds drawn by vonenwolves, genetic hybrids of Old Earth wolves and local doglike vonen predators. With her mothers died everything Sena ever loved. It's also why, even though the only real money to be had on Tundar is in the annual exocarbon races, she refuses to race herself, instead turning to thievery to try to secure money for passage off Tundar to... well, she doesn't even know, but anywhere has to be better than here.
She should've known it would all go wrong...
After a botched theft turns ugly, she flees - and winds up in the clutches of Kalba, the biggest syndicate boss of the Ket. He knows who she is, and who her mothers were... and how good they were with the vonenwolves, a skill he's certain she inherited. In exchange for her freedom, Sena has to patch up one of the man's prize fighting wolves. After her parents died, she wanted nothing to do with the animals, but now she has no choice. Against her will, she is drawn back into the world of the wolves and the races, the world that killed her family. This time, though, she won't be able to run and hide. She'll have to fight back - not just for herself, but for the she-wolf who becomes the closest thing to family she's had in five years.

REVIEW: Another audiobook found via Libby's "Random" sort function, Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves takes the raw Arctic thrills and dangers of dogsledding and transports it to an alien world of larger-than-life predators, inhospitable terrain, cruel corporate greed, and clever, half-feral wolf hybrids. The combination works surprisingly well.
Like many similar protagonists, Sena is a girl scarred by personal tragedy after already being hardened by a life of prejudice on a dystopian colony world governed by offworlder greed: those who don't risk their lives on the frequently-deadly race to the exocarbon fields stay back in dens like those run by Kalba and place bets on who will survive (which leads to significant violence and even sabotage on a race that's already deadly enough thanks to unforgiving terrain and Tundar's local predators, not to mention rumored attacks by the scavvers who famously despise the races and all the corporate avarice and folly they represent). It's to the author's credit that Sena comes across as credibly jaded, not just sulky and whiny (as some such characters do), even before her fateful encounter with the wounded wolf Iska... a wolf who shares the name of her late vonenwolf trainer mother (not a coincidence: the human Iska used to train wolves for Kalba). From the moment girl and wolf first see each other, it's clear there's a deeper bond, a spark of fate at work, though of course Sena resists, too full of unresolved grief and anger to allow herself to trust again... and, of course, the circumstances of their meeting, and her being forced to care for the animal, aren't exactly auspicious. Iska doesn't exactly leap at the chance to bond with a human, either, after a life of cages and pit fighting. But not everyone in the Ket is a monster, nor are all the racers greedy or foolish; a chance encounter with an offworld professor who hopes to study Tundar's unusual exocarbon becomes a lifeline when she needs it most, for all that she doesn't even know what to make of the strange man and his peculiar crew when they meet. It's hardly a spoiler that, despite her protests, she ends up drawn into the race itself, and that along the way she learns a lot more about herself, her wolf, and the fates of her mothers, but there are several unexpected twists and turns along the way, with tension and stakes building nicely and Sena (and the others) not above making some mistakes and missteps in their believably uneven growth along the way. This is not a story where victory or survival are at all assured for anyone, let alone easily won.
There are a few points that wobble a bit. Mostly, I found Kalba to be a bit one-dimensional as a baddie, popping up - sometimes in the literal middle of nowhere - just when things couldn't seem to get any worse for Sena. Other side characters could also use rounding out a bit, or felt dropped by the wayside in the rush of the race. The ending also feels like the setup for a sequel that doesn't seem to exist (yet). But the heart of the story, the hard-won bond between a girl and her genetically hybridized wolf-dog amid the exhilarating dangers of the icy wilderness, is a solid one.

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