Once There Were Wolves

Review first posted at: www.curiositykilledthebookworm.net/2022/01/once-there-were-wolves/

Once there were wolves in Scotland, and Inti hopes that this will be the day when there will be wolves again. She and her team will release fourteen wolves into a landscape ravaged by deer and man in a hope to heal the land. But it’s not just the land that needs healing, for Inti and her twin sister Aggie have horrors in their past.

Trigger warning for rape, domestic abuse and animal deaths.

When driven by fear what are you capable of? And what will you do to protect what you love?

Charlotte McConaghy knows how to make me cry with her beautiful writing and she is fast becoming an instant-buy author. After following the Arctic Terns in Migrations, she now turns her pen towards the wolf, following a team trying to reintroduce them to Scotland. With no large predators in Scotland, the deer can get out of control and eat everything in sight, preventing rewilding success. In theory the wolves will keep the deer population in check, allowing other flora and fauna the chance to move in.

Of course, wolves come with a reputation, and there are objections from the locals. Mostly farmers worried for their livestock, and livelihoods, but also others who fear that the wolves will attack humans.

At first I felt it was a bit us versus them. Inti doesn’t give the locals much of a chance, instantly defensive, she judges their fear, their dislike of the wolves. It is all told from her perspective, so it is not balanced, but as she spends time amongst them, she does start to hear more supportive voices, and most of those she judged harshly come out OK. It speaks of passion and fear.

I totally understand that sheep farmers would worry about the presence of wolves, but there are also a lot of traditional farmers who want to support conservation. It’s implied that the land is dying and rewilding is its last hope. It’s no good raising sheep if there’s nothing for the sheep to eat.

Inti has mirror touch synaesthesia, which means she wrongly interprets sensations she sees as those of her own. When her father gutted a rabbit, she felt like she was being gutted. This has made it hard for her to form relationships, but has also given her more empathy to the natural world.

The story mostly deals with the release of the wolves and what happens when Inti finds a man dead in the woods. Was it the wolves or is there a human killer on the loose? She can’t bear for it to be the wolves, if anyone thought so it would be the end of the project and all the wolves would be killed for sure.

Through flashbacks, we also learn about Inti and Aggie’s life before, growing up with their father in the wilds of Alaska, how Inti deals with her condition and what happened to take away Aggie’s voice.

Incredibly moving, at the same time exploring man’s impact on the natural world, I loved Once There Were Wolves.

Even during the peak of wolf mania a few years ago, I was never really into wolves—or most animals, really, until I looked a cat in the eye. Anyway, this novel focuses heavily on a fictional project of rewilding the Scottish Highlands and reintroducing wolves in order to cull the locally abundant deer population and promote the growth of trees so that the country may be forested once more. Before reading this book, I had little idea of rewilding or conservation aside from the basics, but the premise intrigued me (not to mention the well-designed cover), so when I saw it on BOTM this month, I went for it. Fastest turn around time for a BOTM pick for me—didn’t sit on my shelf too long at all!

This was a weirdly paced book. The beginning opens up with an interesting scene from the twins’ childhood, and the narrative goes back and forth between timelines to gradually dip the reader into the characters’ backstories, traumas, and provide explanations for the current stage of the story. But I found this less engaging and more distracting. I was really immersed in the parts describing the forests, the wild, the wolves—the part that focused on rewilding and taught me quite a bit on what goes into this type of work and more about ecology generally.

The novel naturally focuses on Inti Flynn, the main character, but her relationships to the other characters felt flat and uninspired to me—even her twin sister, Aggie, who supposedly has a deep trauma that impacts Inti tremendously, only makes a brief appearance in the first half of the book. The book does a lot to tell us that Inti cares about her sister, but little to show how or the specific things she does. In fact, a lot of the book is talking to the reader about rewilding, which I appreciated, but it left much to be desired in the way of plot. (There was also a big deal made of her having mirror-touch synesthesia, which is something that sounds cool in the blurb, but in reality it seemed to make little difference to the plot.)

This book also tried to be a murder mystery but there wasn’t much mystery to it honestly, and I’m not a seasoned mystery or thriller reader either. I could see the ‘twist’ coming from quite early on, and when it happened, it felt resolved—but dull. The romance was also extremely unnecessary, but I’m not a fan of that in general so others may have a completely different read of that. Another reviewer also described this book as ‘trauma porn’ and while this didn’t pop immediately in mind while reading like it did for another book I read recently, I can see why that might apply here. I also glanced at a review for the author’s previous romance novel and apparently she has some questionable views, at least through the characters’ mouthpieces, on domestic violence and the relationship between abuser and victim. It didn’t sit well with me.

While this ended up being more of a slow burn read, I did enjoy the exposure to the specific environment that McConaghy presents in this book, as well as the emphasis on the nature of the relationship between human beings and nature, as well as rewilding specifically. The novel also touches on themes of abuse, domestic violence, and the lingering effects of deep-seated traumas, so this isn’t a pleasant walk in the park type of read. Despite these faults, the book inspires a lot of reflection and curiosity in the reader, whether that is looking up more on rewilding, or the nature of forestry in Europe, or what have you. I took my time reading this but I have to admit, I really liked certain parts of it—even while others were lacking.