(The following review has more than one spoiler, so if you haven’t finished or even begun reading The Wolves of Midwinter but are planning on it, please don’t read this till you do. Sorry I have to spoil some things, but I can’t do the novel justice in this review without mentioning one or two very important plot points. I’ll try and keep the number of mentions down though.)
This’ll be last review for a while, so I wanted it to be special, and I can’t think of anything more special to review than Anne Rice’s latest novel. Some of you may remember my review last summer of Ms. Rice’s The Wolf Gift. I’m sorry to say that I won’t be using food metaphors this time around, not just because it’s been a couple hours since my last meal, but also because I found it a little ridiculous, looking back, that I was the reviewer who used food metaphors.
Now on with the review.
Anne Rice has a talent for crafting truly extraordinary stories. In another author’s hands, they might seem mundane or boring, but with her hands she’s able to craft a engrossing novel that keeps you reading the story long after you should go to bed. The Wolves of Midwinter is no exception. In this volume of The Wolf Gift Chronicles, protagonist Reuben Golding has some unexpected developments in his life, including the visit of the ghost of a friend of his. This sets the stage for further developments in Reuben’s life as a Man Wolf, as his fellow Morphenkinder Margon and Felix introduce him, fellow pack member Stuart and Reuben’s lover Laura to some more aspects of their strange, immortal world. At the same time, Reuben deals with the changing dynamics of his family as changes in his life and in the lives of his loved ones occur and as his own immortality becomes more apparent to him, sometimes rather painfully.
What do you brood about tonight, dear Morphenkind?
What is most magnificent about The Wolves of Midwinter is that the novel is always engaging even without a central antagonist or conflict to drive the story forward. Sure, there is a dangerous pack of Morphenkinder with some very dark plans for Reuben and his pack, but they are not essential to the plot that without them there would be no story. Indeed, reading the novel you get the sense that you’re reading about several chains of events closely linked to one another like crisscrossing lines of dominoes, and that the dominoes are just falling to their inevitable conclusions in the book you are reading in your hands. I marvel and kind of envy how the novel was written that way (I wish I could write a story like that. I wonder how Ms. Rice learned how to do it?).
The only part of the novel that I didn’t care for was when Reuben gets a little surprise gift a few months before Christmas, he seems to accept the implications rather quickly and give into the demands his family puts on him without much of an argument. I would’ve rather seen a more in-depth exploration of how he reacted to this surprise gift (not to mention how Laura takes it), but the rest of the novel moved along very well, so that was the only complaint I really had. And when you compare it to the rest of the book, it seems a little bit trivial.
My favorite portion of The Wolves of Midwinter was the last hundred or so pages, starting with some terrifying and unexpected events at a Morphenkind Yuletide celebration, followed by some tribulations in the life of Reuben’s brother Jim, and ending in a joyous celebration at the end of the Christmas season that almost makes you want to cry but instead makes you marvel at how masterfully crafted the ending of the story is.
For The Wolves of Midwinter, I’m giving it a 4.4 out of 5. The storytelling and language, the plot, the characters and how they deal with events as they (sometimes literally) hit them, made this a truly enjoyable read. I hope to read more of Reuben’s story in a future volume of The Wolf Gift Chronicles. Either that or another novel in the Songs of the Seraphim series, I love those books.
Oh and speaking of which, congratulations to Ms. Rice for her Song of the Seraphim novel Angel Time getting made into a TV show like Stephen King’s Under the Dome was this past summer. No word yet on when that’ll be happening, but I can already see it in my head and I bet it’s going to be great. I’m kind of seeing Christopher Eccleston as Toby O’Dare and Mehki Phifer or Omar Epps in the role of Malchiah. Don’t know if that’ll actually happen, but I definitely wouldn’t mind if it did..
Rami Ungar The Writer 