Genres: High Fantasy
Representation: Hungarian-coded cast, Half-Jewish MC, disabled love interest, Dominance/submission, minor F/F or wlw
Published on: 8th June 2021
ISBN: 1529100739
Goodreads
In the vein of Naomi Novik’s New York Times bestseller Spinning Silver and Katherine Arden’s national bestseller The Bear and the Nightingale, this unforgettable debut— inspired by Hungarian history and Jewish mythology—follows a young pagan woman with hidden powers and a one-eyed captain of the Woodsmen as they form an unlikely alliance to thwart a tyrant.
In her forest-veiled pagan village, Évike is the only woman without power, making her an outcast clearly abandoned by the gods. The villagers blame her corrupted bloodline—her father was a Yehuli man, one of the much-loathed servants of the fanatical king. When soldiers arrive from the Holy Order of Woodsmen to claim a pagan girl for the king’s blood sacrifice, Évike is betrayed by her fellow villagers and surrendered.
But when monsters attack the Woodsmen and their captive en route, slaughtering everyone but Évike and the cold, one-eyed captain, they have no choice but to rely on each other. Except he’s no ordinary Woodsman—he’s the disgraced prince, Gáspár Bárány, whose father needs pagan magic to consolidate his power. Gáspár fears that his cruelly zealous brother plans to seize the throne and instigate a violent reign that would damn the pagans and the Yehuli alike. As the son of a reviled foreign queen, Gáspár understands what it’s like to be an outcast, and he and Évike make a tenuous pact to stop his brother.
As their mission takes them from the bitter northern tundra to the smog-choked capital, their mutual loathing slowly turns to affection, bound by a shared history of alienation and oppression. However, trust can easily turn to betrayal, and as Évike reconnects with her estranged father and discovers her own hidden magic, she and Gáspár need to decide whose side they’re on, and what they’re willing to give up for a nation that never cared for them at all.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~‘Kneel.’
~viciousness is a virtue
~truly tortured and tormented love interest
~who says there’s only one kind of magic?
~hardcore Seven Devils by Florence and the Machine energy
~SOMEONE BURN THAT DISGUSTING CROWN
~the myths that make a nation
The Wolf and the Woodsman doesn’t play nice.
This is a book for the darkest of us. For the wolf-girls and the broken boys. For those of us with sharp teeth and sharper claws and sharpest of all, our hearts. This is a book for those who don’t believe in – and don’t want – happy fairytale endings. It’s for those of us who are disappointed by every story that promises us darkness but only flirts with shadows. It’s a book for those who aren’t interested in turning the dark into light, but want instead to embrace all that it is; for those who don’t want to tame it, but to master it.
To make it kneel.
I don’t mean that The Wolf and the Woodsman is grimdark, because I don’t think it is. Grimdark portrays the world as a…well, a grim, dark place, where optimism is laughable and violence is brutal, commonplace, and not worth commenting upon. The Wolf and the Woodsman isn’t a story that insists that humans are inherently terrible and the world is awful. Some humans are terrible, and some parts of the world are awful, sure. And it can get complicated sometimes. But the entrancing, impressive darkness of The Wolf and the Woodsman is in the heart of Évike herself, and the way in which she isn’t punished for it by the narrative.
My most spiteful self, and perhaps my truest.
Évike is an orphan in a pagan village where all woman wield magical abilities given to them by their gods. Évike, as well as having no mother, also has no magic, and those two facts together are all the justification her peers – and their elders – need to ostracise and abuse her. She’s grown up bitter and vicious and, honestly, there is not one part of me that begrudges her that. Especially since, when the king’s Woodsmen appear to claim and take away a seer – the young woman who happens to be Évike’s worst tormentor – Évike is summarily offered up in her place, a deception that is a death sentence not just because none of the girls taken ever come back, but because Évike will, obviously, be killed when the king realises she’s not the seer he wanted.
It’s one thing to know that your people despise you. It’s another thing entirely to discover that they’ll happily offer you up as a, not even a sacrifice – that might have meaning – but a stop-gap. Because the Woodsmen are only going to come back to collect the seer when Évike’s lack of magic is discovered. Évike’s death won’t even mean anything.
But one of the Woodsmen isn’t what he seems, and Évike’s journey to the capital doesn’t go as anyone expects.
Fantasy Like You’ve Never Seen Before
From the very first page, when we’re introduced to the magic wielded by the other women of Keszi, I knew The Wolf and the Woodsman really was going to be different. Sometimes I feel like I’ve read everything the Fantasy genre has to offer, but of course that’s not true; what’s maybe more accurate is that English-speaking Fantasy is glutted with similar settings and stories pulled from Western European mythology, and at this point I’m more than tired of ’em. It’s a more selfish reason I’m so eager to jump on fantasies inspired by African or Asian cultures; the ethics of diversity matter to me immensely, but as a reader I’m also motivated by the jolt of newness that comes from stories that draw from cultures I don’t know. Those stories feel so fresh and unique and interesting because they’re intrinsically different from those steeped in the story-telling traditions I grew up with.
But The Wolf and the Woodsman feels a bit like a slap upside the head as a reminder that, yeah, I’m bored of Western European fantasy. I know next to nothing about Eastern Europe’s stories. I’ve never really thought about them. Even since moving to Finland, I’ve paid more attention to Nordic mythology and folklore, but still forgot to consider the traditions of the countries that are now my next-door neighbours.
What I’m trying to say is that The Wolf and the Woodsman has the same thrilling sense of newness to it – which is not really newness, but new-to-me-ness – that books like Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, or The Unbroken by CL Clark, do. Reid is drawing from somewhere much closer to home than India or North Africa, but Hungary is just as unfamiliar to me. Maybe even more unfamiliar to me, in some ways. And I think that’s something that English-speaking readers really need to know: assuming you’re like me, and are only intimately familiar with fantasy as it’s evolved in North America and Western Europe, this book feels like a breath of fresh air. I can quite honestly say this is fantasy like I’ve never seen it before.
And it’s brilliant.
The unfamiliar aspects of the worldbuilding seem superficial – unfamiliar magic powers, pagan traditions I’ve not encountered before – but at the same time, they strike a deep note, make a music that runs all through the book, hypnotic and new and beautiful. Somehow, it’s more than new magic systems and monsters; there’s something I can’t name, something that goes right to the core and heart of this story, that proudly sets it apart from more familiar stories. I don’t have the technical language to tell you exactly what it is, to dissect The Wolf and the Woodsman open and point to how pulling from different mythologies has flowed outwards from the book’s premise to affect and alter its every aspect. I can only tell you that it is so.
Rich and Dark
Other than drawing from unfamiliar-to-me folklore, what really sets The Wolf and the Woodsman apart is the main character Évike. I already mentioned that she’s bitter and vicious, and that the narrative doesn’t punish her for it, but I want to drive the point home again because that is just so revolutionary. Even in Adult Fantasy, women aren’t often allowed to be this sharp, this unlikable, and when they are the story usually forces them to soften, to lay down their claws and become something gentler in order to be granted their happy ending.
But I had tried kindness. I had tried sheathing my claws. It only made it easier for her to strike me down again.
Reid doesn’t declaw her heroine. Évike does eventually learn that there are people who will treat her gently, and that she doesn’t always need to strike first because not everyone is out to belittle or hurt her. But she is as sharp-edged at the end of the book as she is at the start, and just as hungry, just as unfeminine. She is a wolf-girl on the first page and she is a wolf-girl to the last, and I adored that about her, and I adored it about the book that she is allowed to be that, unflinchingly and unapologetically.
He wanted me dead when I was mute and lowing under is father’s blade, and he still wants me dead now, when I am snarling back at him and showing all my teeth.
One of the aspects of this that I think I have to talk about is Évike’s sexuality. Évike is what might, in our modern world, be called a dominatrix; certainly there’s no way to pretend that she doesn’t hunger for the submission of her sex-and-love interest, that she doesn’t draw pleasure from tormenting him. There are no whips and chains, and the sex itself isn’t what I’d consider explicit, but it’s the emotional hungers, and the emotional dynamic and give-and-take between Évike and her Woodsman, that are unmistakably thick with the Dominance/submission aspects of BDSM. Not codified, careful, modern D/s; Évike and her sort-of-partner have no safeword, for example.
But I’ve seen jokes about ‘take a shot every time Gáspár kneels’, and darlings, if you do, you’re going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning. If you don’t end up with alcohol poisoning outright.
Because Gáspár, tormented as he is, loves to kneel to Évike, and Évike loves to make him.
And this is all tied up with – it’s not gentle. It’s not fond. It’s raw and rich and vital, it’s gleeful and triumphant, it’s greedy and sharp and tortured, it’s hungry, it’s dark in a luscious, thrilling way that stories generally aren’t allowed to be outside of erotica. The Wolf and the Woodsman isn’t erotica, but it is still fiercely sexual, more than a little bit twisted, utterly delicious. And I cannot emphasise enough that this simply isn’t a romantic/sexual dynamic we get to see very often, especially with the heroine as the Dominant of the pair.
And Évike is never punished for this. The narrative never punishes her for her sexuality, or her hungers, as twisted as some people might consider them (they’re really not, but I can understand that they may be shocking to some readers). If anything, The Wolf and the Woodsman revels in Évike and Gáspár’s dynamic and relationship, and I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed it.
This isn’t the only darkness in this book – far from it. The Wolf and the Woodsman is no-holds-barred when it comes to ruthlessness, body-horror magic, religious fanaticism, the cruelties of those in power, the bloodstained tapestry of history. An incredibly important thread of this story is Évike discovering her Jewish heritage – her mother may have been a pagan, but her father was not, and in being dragged from her home Évike is also introduced to her father’s people, religion, and culture – and unfortunately, part of that includes discovering antisemitism, both hearing it and witnessing it. The image of a Jewish man forced to dance in pig’s blood is horrific even to goyim like me; I can’t imagine how much worse it might hit a Jewish reader. But I do tentatively think that Reid manages not to cross the line into misery-porn.
That said – I acknowledge that the body-horror aspect is relatively low compared to some books the memory of which I have tried hard to bleach out of my brain, but seriously, it’s there. The magic of the Woodsmen is specifically drawn from self-mutilation, and readers should be braced for that. It never got so gory I had to DNF it, but I did sometimes have to take breaks from the book. Consider carefully whether these are topics you want to read about/can handle!
The Writing
I can’t believe this is Reid’s debut, folx. It’s just so incredibly polished, appallingly gorgeous, and scythe-sharp clever. I’ve already talked a little about the use of folklore and mythology, but only in the sense that the Hungarian folklore is beautifully new to me. It’s not as simple as Reid pulling inspiration from somewhere unfamiliar, though; there’s the way she’s flipped the tapestry over to show us the underside, all the knots and stitches that lie beneath what we think of as a nation. One of the biggest thematic elements of this book has got to be the brutally honest, and honestly brutal, depiction of nation-building; the deft dissection of whom a land belongs to, who gets to call a place home, how many disparate pieces it takes to make a nation.
“You’re just like any other Southerner, thinking you can tear the North apart and eat its most tender bits. You can’t eat a thing that’s still alive.”
The conflict between the various pagan groups and the dominant ‘Patrifaith’ – a recognisable stand-in for Christianity, more or less – and between the Patrifaith and the Jews are basically the driving forces behind the entire novel, since it’s the king’s desire to make use of pagan magics that is the reason Évike is taken from her home. The hypocrisy of practicality and ‘making use’ of others, versus religious fanaticism, is the main schism being driven through the nobility, even as those Patritian nobles only are noble because they lay claim to ancient pagan bloodlines.
I’ve grown so weary of meager Patritian kindnesses with their ugly underbellies, like a gleaming handful of holly berries: they look sweet, but it will kill you to swallow them.
Also – I’m not Jewish, or Christian, or Évike’s kind of pagan, but I absolutely adored how the different religions and traditions were quietly compared.
Zsigmond scrawls questions in the the very margins of his scrolls, underlining passages that he agrees with and marking up ones that he doesn’t. All of it baffles me. Can you believe in something while still running your hand over its every contour, feeling for bumps and bruises, like a farmer trying to pick the best, roundest peach?
“That is the only way to truly believe in something,” Zsigmond says. “When you’ve weighed and measured it yourself.”
And none of this is info-dumped on us; it all unfolds elegantly, page by page. Reid never lectures us, just presents Évike’s story to us and lets us unravel and analyse what we’re shown for ourselves. Which is one of my favourite literary strategies, for the record.
One detail I do have to mention is the turul, a magical bird that has an incredibly important place in the beliefs of Évike and other pagans. As I’ve said, I know next to nothing about Hungarian mythology, but I’m fascinated by mythological animals in particular, so I did go and look up the bird that is the immensely important Quest Object of The Wolf and the Woodsman. And one of the first things I found is that, as a symbol, it’s been co-opted by far-right groups for a big chunk of the 20th and 21st centuries: specifically, antisemitic groups. And I feel like that adds even more depth, even more layers, to this book, because it’s a half-Jewish pagan who goes after the turul, one who does so in huge part out of a desire to safeguard her father’s people. There’s something defiantly subversive about reclaiming a symbol from antisemitic asshats and turning it into something that will, hopefully, instead save the Jewish people of the nation. I don’t have the cultural context, or the smarts, to unravel all the layers of that, but I love it, and needed to include it in my review, because wow does that add more to this book.
Honestly, I do not know how Reid packed so much into just over 400 pages. I very much suspect it’s going to take a few more rereads before I pick up on even half of everything woven into this story. The Wolf and the Woodsman just has that much depth, that many layers. There’s no way to unpack it all in one read-through.
And this is all without talking about Reid’s prose, which is gorgeous. When I realised this book was going to be narrated in first-person present tense, I was immediately wary, because most of the time I hate that. But it not only worked perfectly here, Reid’s actual writing style is just a joy to read.
Each step forward and our twined fate hardens, as unyielding as steel.
I should wring his kindnesses out of me like water from my hair.
I sleep only in short bursts, the night seamed through with dreams.
All in All?
This is a gods’-damned masterpiece, in so many ways, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. And if you still need convincing, you can read an excerpt over here on gizmodo.
It’s out on Tuesday. You’ve still got time to preorder if you haven’t yet. I really hope you do, because The Wolf and the Woodsman is, without question, one of the best books of the year – and missing out on it would be a tragedy.
Leave a Reply