Wolfsong

, #1

Paperback, 736 pages

English language

Published Sept. 29, 2018 by Dreamspinner Press.

ISBN:
978-1-64108-109-2
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4 stars (12 reviews)

The Bennett family has a secret: They're not just a family, they're a pack. Wolfsong is Ox Matheson's story.

Oxnard Matheson was twelve when his father taught him a lesson: Ox wasn’t worth anything and people would never understand him. Then his father left.

Ox was sixteen when the energetic Bennett family moved in next door, harboring a secret that would change him forever. The Bennetts are shapeshifters. They can transform into wolves at will. Drawn to their magic, loyalty, and enduring friendships, Ox feels a gulf between this extraordinary new world and the quiet life he’s known, but he finds an ally in Joe, the youngest Bennett boy.

Ox was twenty-three when murder came to town and tore a hole in his heart. Violence flared, tragedy split the pack, and Joe left town, leaving Ox behind. Three years later, the boy is back. Except now he’s a man – …

7 editions

reviewed Wolfsong by T. J. Klune (Green Creek, #1)

-

3 stars

An unsteady first entry to a series I'll likely continue and that I expect will enjoy the later entries more. If nothing else, I can pat myself on the back for pushing through a premise that initially had me feeling pretty uncomfortable.

Fantasy is my "maybe this time I'll like it!" genre. From fully-fictional worlds with paragraphs of background exposition to only slightly-incredible magical realism, it never really sticks for me, but I think this is the closest I've gotten to enjoying it in a long while. Basically we have here a setting where 1) werewolves are real and 2) magic is real, but we learn this as readers at the same steady pace as our mundane protagonist does. So far so good.

And really the paranormal aspects really just serve as a vehicle to drive home on the themes of family, loyalty/betrayal, and self-worth. And boy are those themes …

reviewed Wolfsong by T. J. Klune (Green Creek, #1)

not really epic or awesome

2 stars

This is the first shifter story I've read and I don't think I'm a fan of the tropes I saw in it.

The first one is not specific to these stories but it bugs me every time I see it: on one hand, Ox - the main character - is described as a little slow and rather average, probably so that readers can identify with him, or at least empathize with him. On the other hand, he accomplishes unheard-of feats, and the other characters keep telling him how unique and extraordinary he is.

To be clear, I'm not against wish fulfillment stories, or just stories where there's an obvious fantasy at play. For instance The Goblin Emperor reads like a fantasy for people who have been mistreated in the past and feel that, if they were given a lot of power, they would use it to treat other people with …

Review of 'Wolfsong' on 'Storygraph'

No rating

Wolfsong is the story if a young man, Ox, whose father has left him and his mother. Ox finds family and more with a pack of werewolves that move in next door. 

I didn’t know until reading it that this book was being republished (it was originally published in 2015), presumably to capitalize on the popularity of House on the Cerulean Sea.

I loved HotCS. It was unique and amazing. The same can’t really be said of Wolfsong. It is a good example of the wolf pack genre, but falls into the traps and tropes of the genre without distinguishing itself. I’m not a fan of the whole Alpha trope. For one, it is not an accurate way of representing wolf family structures, which we’ve known for 20 years (at least 10 when the book was written). For another, it feels like repeating it merely reinforces outdated ideas of hierarchy …

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