For the Wolf
The Wilderwood series, Book 1
Hannah Whitten
Orbit
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Long ago, the magic of the Wilderwood was available to all who willingly laid a sacrifice beneath its branches... until the Five Kings struck a bargain to imprison the dark gods and monsters beneath their roots, diverting all power to that monumental and eternal task. But the forest would still bargain, if at a higher price. And when the Five Kings rode into the woods again, they became imprisoned in the Shadowlands too. Only the seemingly-immortal man known as the Wolf remains in the Wilderwood now, protecting the people from the shapeshifting monsters that slip free from the Shadowlands. For his service, he demands the second royal daughter of every ruler of Valleyda be sent to the Wilderwood, never to be seen again.
Red has known her fate since childhood. While her older sister Neve will someday inherit the silver crown, she is no more than a sacrificial lamb for the Wolf, and nothing her sister or her handful of friends can do will change that fate - especially not once she showed the Mark of all Second Daughters, a sign of the eternal pact between the people and the forest that keeps the gods imprisoned. Some day, the Temple priestesses declare, the Wolf will relent and let the Five Kings free, but why should Red be any different than the other Daughters who have gone before? She cannot even bring herself to be angry anymore about her fate, though Neve has more than enough anger for them both: anger at their cold and distant mother, anger at the Temple and the old gods, anger at the Wilderwood, and anger at the Wolf and his demand for sacrifices.
What Red finds in the Wilderwood beneath the boughs of the white sentinel trees is not at all what she imagined. The Wolf is no evil beast, but a man who, like her, has been bound by bargains and magicks over which he has no control. Worse, the Wilderwood has sickened, sentinel trees disappearing into gaps through which monsters emerge, and he's running out of strength to hold the prison gates closed. As much as Red yearns to escape and return to her sister, she cannot ignore the dangers that would befall everyone and everything she ever loved should the Wolf and the Wilderwood fall. But there are those who would stop at nothing to release the five lost Kings of old - and there are those too blinded by anger and love to realize what they're about to destroy...
REVIEW: I had high hopes going into this one, for all that there are obviously some familiar tropes at play. For the most part, I enjoyed it, though it never quite rose to the level of my highest expectations.
From the beginning, the dynamics of the characters and the world are well established. Neve keeps trying to convince Red that she can escape her obligations, that she can run away, and even has some friends and allies on board with the plan, but Red remains dedicated... not out of a sense of duty to her kingdom or her royal mother (both of which have always treated her as a disposable object, keeping her at arm's length) or out of piety to the Temple (neither she nor Neve really believe the priestesses who promise that, someday, the sacrifice of the Second Daughter will free the Five Kings), but because of a darker secret, one that she fears will destroy the few people she truly does love if she were to remain in Valleyda. Even then, given the chance to fight and live or lie down and die in the Wilderwood, she chooses life - and learns that almost everything she has been taught about the place, and about the Wolf, is dead wrong. As she comes to terms with her new circumstances and the new dangers around her, Neve remains desperate to rescue her sister... and here things started to shake a bit for me. The princess allies herself with a fanatical priestess seeking to subvert the traditional Temple teachings in favor of a more pro-active approach to ending the Wolf's reign and freeing the Kings, a woman who is so clearly evil that even blind sisterly devotion can't possibly be enough to mask the insanity.
With no way to communicate, the sisters end up working at cross purposes, with the fate of the Wilderwood and the greater realm hanging in the balance. Despite some occasional meandering and muddy bits, plus a little too much brooding and angst (particularly on the part of the Wolf himself, teetering on the trope/cliché line a little too often), a reasonably satisfying ending is partially marred by cliffhanger elements without being a straight-up cliffhanger, setting up the second volume in the duology... one I'm not sure I'll pursue, if I'm being honest, because it showed every sign of repeating some of the stuff that started to wear on me in this book, particularly the tormented, brooding, angst-ridden soul being redeemed by the power of love. (I will say, in its favor, that For the Wolf had a rather pointed subtext about consent and listening to women; this would've been a novella had people - even those who were closest to her and loved her best - actually listened to Red and respected her choices rather than barging ahead, convinced they knew better than she did what she really needed...)
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