The Wolf and the Woodsman

I wasn't sure about this book at first, for a few reasons - the biggest being the way it seemed to be setting up a romance between a woman from an oppressed minority (consistently referred to as a "girl" despite her 25 years), and a man who is her oppressor. He abducts her and does a bunch of horrible stuff, but as they travel together and are forced to rely on each other, she grows into lust for him and he becomes increasingly humanized. That's... not a dynamic I enjoy reading, nor one I approve of: it reads as regressive, and a good half of the book is pretty much devoted to it.

The good news is that as it goes on, it grows into nuance. People actually grow and learn, and while this dubious romance bit is critical to that - the humanization goes both ways - it's not just as simple as "falling in love with the enemy swaps everyone's ideology and solves all the problems". So that turns out to be all right. Sort of.

The other main reason is the writing style, which I'm not personally much of a fan of: very, very dense with description and figurative language, with absolutely constant use of active voice, to the point where there's no dynamic range to speak of. It's weirdened a bit further by the way it interacts with the perspective - first person present tense is usually good for immediacy and character, while the density of the prose has a distancing effect and the implication that Évike constantly thinks in this active-language-metaphors way is not really reflected or explored in the rest of her characterization. I could imagine there being a good reason for this, if it better reflects Hungarian speech patterns or something, but speaking as someone who knows no Hungarian whatsoever I can't tell if that's the case. Regardless: some dynamics would have helped.

The worldbuilding fits a weird in-between spot: I was expecting a world built around Hungarian folklore, but this is probably rather alt-historical. There are Fantasy Jews. There is Fantasy Christianity (but with a different, Fantasy Greek origin story). Fantasy Hungary borders on Fantasy Austria-or-Germany-or-something. With everything seemingly having a direct real-world analogue, I'm hesitant to call this secondary-world fantasy, but everything is also different enough that I'm not sure I've learned anything about any actual cultures, current or historical.

The one thing that I really, really like about this book, though, is the way it deals with religion. There are three main cultures/religions mentioned (a fourth is not gone into much detail over) and while the narrative to some extent pits them against each other, there's magic (though sometimes not called by that name) associated with each of them. I like the way that contradicting religions are all treated as... I want to say "true", but truth doesn't enter into it, not really; but as powerful, at any rate. The characters take sides, of course, but the worldbuilding itself doesn't favor any one religion and also doesn't favor atheism, which is a really neat effect and not one I'm sure I've ever seen before!

I also like the way that religion shapes the characters' worldviews and ideologies, even when you take away the beliefs and mythology and faith-based powers and whatnot. Culture is often reduced to things like food and clothes and how people celebrate which holidays, and that's all part of it to be sure, but this book did a great job of exploring the way it can shape people even aside from all those trappings.

Selling points: alt-historical if you're into that; interesting and fairly nuanced take on religion; casual lesbian representation (minor, almost background); (fantasy) Jewish representation.

Warnings: slightly heavy-handed romance with extremely unequal power dynamic; religious violence; moderately graphic violence, though I find the writing style somewhat dampens the effect of it; not enough passive voice.

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. The good parts were good (the characterization), the bad parts were bad (the... politics?), the mediocre parts were mediocre (the worldbuilding). That said, I can't tell how much of that is my own personal expectations not being met, versus the novel doing what it's set itself up to do. The book is very front-loaded with fairy tales, should I be disappointed in its lack of a darker ending, when so much of the book itself is dark and brooding?

Without giving any spoilers away, let me just say I think the book is perfect if you chop the epilogue off. But I'm maybe overfond of ambiguity.

Medieval Jews... don't make it out okay. Pagans... don't make it at all. This book seems to be somewhat more interested in history than fairy tales, but perhaps that's, again, my preference for historicity over fairy tales. I just can't buy that everything is going to be okay, after so much blood has been spilled.

More Eastern European Jewish folklore-inspired fantasy please 

The Wolf and the Woodsman is set in a world frequented by religious persecution. The official religion of the country is the Patrifaith, sacrificing parts of themselves to Saint Istan to be gifted power in return. The Patritians wish to rid their land of both pagans and Yehuli, a religion that represents Judaism in this world. I liked that while they all had their different beliefs, that belief all gave them magic of a kind. Not one religion was “the right one”.

The one-eyed Woodsman turns out to be no ordinary Woodsman, and soon him and Évike are on a quest to find a mythical beast that might just be the answer to both their problems. Évike might have been bullied all her life but she still sees herself as a wolf girl, she still doesn’t want to see her home and her family destroyed, even if she doesn’t like them very much. This is not a story with clear cut morality.

The throne is at risk to being lost to a charismatic individual, one who indoctrinates hatred through his impassioned speeches, blaming the country’s problems on the Yehuli, calling the pagans witches out for trouble. He represents a leader who can whip up hatred and create the path towards genocide. The story is based on Hungarian and Jewish history and mythology, and I’m guessing that history is around World War II and the rise of fascism in the early 20th century.

I loved the mythology so much. The religions were all connected but separate, at times brutal when characters lop off bits of themselves in order to be favoured by a god. Évike talks about some of the stories and myths, during her travels, helping to create a well-rounded picture of this world. The creatures that populate it include both the wonderful and the creepy.

It’s also lovely to have a fully formed standalone fantasy like this. There is a proper ending!

THE WOLF AND THE WOODSMAN is an enemies-to-lovers tale filled with bickering and tender moments of wound-care. It luxuriates in tense conversation, short back-and-forth dialogues punctuated by stony silence and snow. The MC’s narrative ruminations on her traveling companion deftly show what she thinks of him while leaving room for something more in his body language that an interested reader might puzzle out. They fill the silence in a way that ensures the reader is never left alone, even while the MC is trapped in her head, relentlessly pondering the meaning of every word, silence, and gesture from the Woodsman. They are drawn together by a strangely aligned goals that have, at minimum, a destination in common for both of them. Once at this destination, the narrative opens somewhat while still keeping focus on the weight of words and the way they can twist in an instant from toying to cruel, from mild interest to genuine warmth. Its slowly widening scope introduces the political tightrope the MC must traverse. Here it becomes apparent that amid all that travel, banter, and attempts to not fall in love was a lot of very important information about the power structure and current state of the kingdom and its leader. I really like political structures in fantasy, and therefore was very interested in this one, but it isn’t a politically dense book. It conveyed really well essential social information in a seemingly inconsequential manner before the MC arrived in locations where she needed to use that knowledge, and I appreciate how well it was worked in. 

One of the strengths of this as an enemies-to-lovers story was that the MC and the eventual love interest had pretty good reasons to dislike each other as kinds of people, but not to already hate each other specifically, which made the transformation from ire to romance feel believable but not rushed. A lot of really excellent emotional groundwork and world-building was laid in the first half of the book, which meant that the second half could carefully subvert some (but not all) of those expectations and play with their implications in some really great ways. I feel a little as though that’s just how good books work, but the first and second half feel so distinct to me. Each had their own unique flavor which made the whole book sing. The world building is really good. I like the way that there were canonically several paths to magic, all of which are different in their particulars but involve some combination of access, mastery, and sacrifice. The MC begins the book thinking that she is unable to use the path that everyone has been expecting her to have. she finds her way into the path that’s good for her; not wholly new ground, something recognizable to those around her even if her specific blend is a bit strange.