Today, I'm here to recommend one of the best books ever:Wolf Brother (Book 1 of the Chronicle of Ancient Darkness). It has wonderful plot, lovable characters, and clear, beautiful prose. Five stars, you can't ask for more.
Author: Michelle Paver
Title: Wolf Brother (Book 1 of the Chronicle of Ancient Darkness)
Publisher: Orion Children’s Books
Copyright date: 2004 May 27
Number of pages: 224
ISBN No: 1-84255-170-1
Key words: Wolf, forest, demon, saving the world.
Genre: Fiction, adventure.
Summary:
Wolf Brother is the first in a series of books that revolve around a story of an endowed boy born in America before Jesus Christ himself came into the world. Torak, our main character, is put through the ordeal of abandoning his father to a demon bear in the beginning of the book. Orphaned and alone, he meets a wolf cub while wandering in the forest. At first, Torak is all for killing the cub and eating it, but the realization that he could understand the wolf stops him short. This is a bit of a spoiler, but when Torak was just a baby, his mother died. Usually, when the baby’s mother dies, the child will starve to death, because back in that time there weren’t any Kirkland Baby Milk Powder or anything like that. Yet, Torak’s resourceful father found a way to keep him alive: he put Torak into the den of a mother wolf. By drinking the wolf’s milk, Torak was able to stay alive and he somehow learned to speak the language of wolves in the process. He decides to befriend the cub, who becomes his sole companion and best friend. The two travel together happily before Torak is caught by some hunters and brought into civilization. The people are afraid because a killer bear has been out to get them-the exact beast that took down Torak’s father. Some are of the opinion to kill Torak and send his heart’s blood to the mountain because according to a prophecy, that’s what’s going to stop the bear. However, some others, like Renn (the heroine) thinks the prophecy means that Torak would be the one to slay the demon, and if he’s killed, the demon will be unstoppable. Torak runs away upon this, fearing for his life. He almost gets caught but Renn and Wolf (the cub) helps him get away. Renn then tells Torak how to stop the bear and offers her help. The three then set out to find the ‘keys’ to killing the demon, all the while avoiding people and running from the bear. In the end, Renn and Torak find the keys, and successfully kills the demon bear. Then, Torak is offered a shelter in Renn’s clan, an offer which he gladly accepted.
Personal Response:
It was no easy task writing that summary, I tell you. I had to leave out a lot of parts because the author left hooks everywhere, and you’ll only get the whole picture if you read all the seven books. In other words, the author scattered little pieces of puzzles that only made sense if you put them together, otherwise they’re just scraps of random information. As I’m only supposed to give a response on the first book, I left those scraps out. The series is called ‘Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’, and it’s set in America just after the ice age, when agriculture hadn’t been developed yet and people still had to fight against demons and the like. I ripped the map of Torak’s world from the book because it helps you to understand the story better.
I got really confused when Torak was traveling through the forest at first, then began strolling up a valley, then went up a mountain boulder, then got stranded on a mountain of ice and somehow got back to the forest like nothing happened. Thank god Mrs. Paver got someone to draw a map or I’ll never be able to understand the geography of that world.
Confusing though it all is, the part that caught me most about the book was the setting. In Torak’s world, people were divided into clans. The clans are each named after animals, and the animal they’re named after is sacred to them. For example, Torak’s father was wolf clan, and it would mean that Torak, in turn, is also of the wolf clan. As such, Torak is forbidden to kill a wolf, and he must offer a bit of food at every meal to his clan-guardian, the wolf. In each clan, there is a clan leader, a mage and the clansmen.
A mage is like a witch, a healer and a magician all rolled into one. They are feared and respected at the same time in their clans. The Mage is also the profession of the man who caused all the fuss about demons in the first place. In this book, it only tells us a Mage caught a demon and put it in a bear. The Mage himself doesn’t even show up here. In other books, you’ll see that there’s more than one bad Mage, and it’s Torak’s fate to fight them. It takes one heck of an imagination to make up something like this.
The other thing that really caught my fancy about the setting is that the people live in harmony with the forest. Animal cruelty simply doesn’t exist in that world. Their clan-creatures are the most sacred in the world, but the people also respect the forest and other animals as well. When you hunt and make a kill, you’re supposed to thank the prey’s spirit for letting you have their meat. Also, it’s taboo to waste anything, as everything is a gift from the forest. In the middle part of the book, Torak mentions something called a world-soul, a name soul and a clan soul-a genius string of euphemisms Paver came up with to call your physical and psychological status. Below are my interpretations for these three souls.
Name Soul: Basically it’s who you are, and it’s insulin to a diabetic-lost it and you know you’re not going to live long.
Clan Soul: Your consciousness and Effexor. Without it, you’ll be as emo as Hulk- without the green skin.
World Soul: What links you to every other thing in the world; I guess I would compare it to the streams linking pools and lakes that eventually flow into the ocean?
After reading ‘Wolf Brother’, it has since been my convictions that lawyers should not be writers. They are simply much too smart, if all of them decided to change track, full-time writers would be out of work in no time. I mean, look at the world Michelle Paver created; I haven’t seen the likes of this since Deltora. Wereworld, frankly, doesn’t even come close. And don’t even mention Charlie Bone.
Besides the setting, I also liked the characters a lot, especially the main character. Torak is a good protagonist, because he’s got good hunter instincts, and notices everything around him. Looking at the world through his eyes, you won’t miss a thing. He’s a bit awkward around people, but that’s because the only other person he had really been around since childhood was his father. Plus, Torak is really smart, unlike Thomas from Maze Runner who is apparently supposed to be a genius but sure doesn’t act like one (when they tell you not to go in the maze, don’t freaking go running around in the maze!) The female character didn’t annoy me either, which seems to be the case in most English Novels (the only female characters I’ve ever liked was Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot from Persuasion, I don’t even like Heidi, which just shows.) I liked her personality, and love how the author made her so skilled in archery.
When reading the first book, some things might appear illogical to you, like how does drinking a she-wolf’s milk for a few months make Torak an expert in speaking Wolf? Why would any sane man decide to trap a demon in a bear’s body just for the fun of it? People aren’t supposed to hunt their clan-creatures, but before Torak found out he could talk to Wolf, that was exactly what he planned to do; isn’t that weird? Fear not, because Paver gradually answers all these questions in the later books- what a way to keep your readers on their toes!
I picked up Wolf Brother at my local book store eight years ago, and it has since become one of my favorites. It is true that the literary elements of the series are somewhat average, but the world Paver created, the magic she wove into the story with her learned pen-it draws you into the world of Ancient Darkness from the initial turn of the very first page.
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