skylacine's reviews
1042 reviews

It's not bad or anything, it's historically pretty accurate to the real events. But this book just kinda made me feel, well, nothing. It felt a bit too matter-of-factly to me. I didn't feel the emotions and excitement it was trying to make me feel.

At times I do question Cas' methods a bit (he still uses a form if dominance theory and punishments, which goes straight against everything regarding dog training I've been taught in animal care college), but all the same his stories are interesting to read.

Obviously a book for younger readers, but it still gets the job done of teaching them about wolves. It has a lot of good information it delivers in a straight-to-the-point manner and has some lovely illustrations to boot.

The only thing I think they didn't explain very well (at least in the Dutch translation) is how wolf packs work. They briefly mention stuff like dominance and use the term "alpha" but they never really make it explicitly clear how wolf packs (usually) work, with a breeding pair and pups and offspring of the past year,  and possibly other (related or in rarer cases unrelated) wolves. I get that this book wants to deliver information in bite-sized chunks and a quick manner, but if I read this as a kid without prior information about these animals, I think it'd only have confused me more on how wolf packs really work, rather than making things clear to me.

A decent nonfiction about wolves and their relations to society (particularly in the Netherlands and western Europe). The information presented is good and the author's writing voice is pleasant, but the sections are very short and feel a bit rushed.

The presentation of the book also feels very amateuristic, from the font choice to how images were inserted to this book definitely needing another edit (some placeholder text from an earlier draft was accidentally kept in the final product). It just feels rough and a bit unpolished.

I normally don't mind xenofiction where the animals don't talk, but this is a case where I think the wolves SHOULD'VE talked. They're very anthropomorphized, anyways (they have their own traditions and culture and prejudices), plus this is a fantasy book, so having the animals talk would've probably worked better than keeping them quiet.

As is, this book does a lot of telling (e.g. "Mala felt X emotion") but not a lot of showing. The wolves do have distinct personalities, but again I think these would've come across better had there been actual dialogue.

Also, despite Mala supposedly being the main character she doesn't get a lot of page-time or POV-chapters.

Not a terrible book by any means but I think having the wolves talk would've fixed a lot of its issues.

Lovely book about the famous wolf O-Six and her family. I hope McIntyre keeps writing these books.

 

Reading a lot of Dutch atm. Not sure why.

This is a nice book about the author discovering more than 1000 different species in his garden. Pretty nice and relaxing read.

That was pretty good but very short. I personally like Bende van de Bokkenrijders better.

Cute book about the author's dog slowly growing up, showcasing the good times and bad times. Pretty wholesome and a lot of Suzie's behaviors match those of my late dog, Bode, so this felt pretty familiar.

I do have to bring up that there's a few typos in this book though.