Beyond the Black River, among the forests and mountains of the north, lives an ancient race of people. Their lives are measured in centuries, not decades; they revel in wilderness and resilience, and they scorn wealth and comfort.

By contrast, those in the south live in the moment, their lives more fleeting. They crave wealth and power; their ambition is limitless, and their cunning unmatched.

When the armies of the south flood across the Black river, the fragile peace between the two races is shattered. On a lightning-struck battlefield, the two sides will fight – for their people, for their land, for their very survival.

In my last review, I talked a bit about how I’ve got a bunch of series I’m reading, and how I’m hoping to try to bring that number down a little going forward. Something else I’m hoping to tackle is the small(ish) backlog of books I was sent for review, but for one reason or another, I’ve yet to read. I know this happens to most book bloggers, and I know we all feel guilty about it! But hey, we’re trying!

The Wolf by Leo Carew seems like one of those books that flew a bit under the radar last year, but I hope this book & series finds its audience. This is one I enjoyed quite a bit…I found the writing to be incredibly strong, and the characters pretty memorable. I have some issues with The Wolf overall, and I’ll get into those, but this is a solid read.

Where a lot of fantasy novels seem concerned with an epic scope & massive world building, the story in The Wolf is told on a much smaller scale. This first book in Carew’s Under the Northern Sky series concerns two warring nations, The Black Kingdom & Suthdal. The Anakim occupy The Black Kingdom, in the North, with the Sutherners in Suthdal, in the South (yeah, that’s a crappy sentence, but I did what I could!)

After an early & brutal battle between The Black Kingdom & Suthdal, nineteen-year-old Roper Kynortasson finds himself unexpectedly the ruler of The Black Kingdom. While assuming the role of The Black Lord is something Roper has been training his whole life for, it’s still something of a shock when it becomes his new reality.

It’s also a reality that won’t be easily accepted by many of the warriors who fight for The Black Kingdom, with one legendary fighter named Uvoren challenging Roper every step of the way. Based on what little I know about Viking culture (mostly from watching Vikings), and in light of the way the characters are named (with -son or -dottir at the end of their last names), it would seem Carew took a lot of influence from that time period. In The Black Kingdom, it isn’t just enough to be named Black Lord. Anyone can challenge you for the title, at any time. You earn it & keep it by having strong alliances & by being a great warrior yourself.

Roper has a lot of work to do.

On the Suthdal side, the POV character is a man named Bellamus. While he holds no official military titles, Bellamus is a student of the Anakim way of life. The two cultures are incredibly different. The Anakim are massive, usually around seven feet tall & with a crazy plate of bone armor beneath their skin. They also live to be over 200 years old. The Sutheners are quite diminutive by comparison, and (I think) don’t live nearly as long. Nevertheless, they’ve battled one another countless times over the years.

So…one of the first things that was hard for me to adjust to in The Wolf was the balance of the two main POVs. Maybe I’ve just grown so accustomed to the format where a whole chapter is devoted to one POV character, before switching to another character for the next chapter. But in the early going of The Wolf, it bounces back & forth between Roper’s POV and Bellamus’s POV, within the same chapter. It isn’t confusing or hard to follow, I guess I just prefer the more typical format, where a new chapter starts with the POV change.

Another gripe I had along a similar line is that, for the first (maybe) 60% of the book, it’s relatively balanced between both sides. I mean, it’s clear that Roper is the main character of the book. But we do get to see so much from Bellamus’s POV, to the point where there isn’t a clear “good guys v. bad guys” dynamic at work here, which I really dug. The problem I had is in the later stages of the book, we really don’t see much from Bellamus’s side at all…I just really found the last big chunk of this book to be very unbalanced, compared to the earlier sections.

The other thing that really stood out to me in The Wolf is that it really could’ve featured more roles for women. I guess between the totally badass women on Vikings, and my tendency to seek out fantasy novels that feature even more totally badass women, I just wanted to see more of that in The Wolf. Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly some well written & interesting women in this book. But for a novel that is VERY heavy on action & battle scenes, I think opening the field up to some women warriors would have been a good idea. Again, I don’t think The Wolf is misogynistic in any way, and the women in this book aren’t mistreated or poorly written characters…there just could’ve been…more.

I’ve dwelt so long on the issues I had with this book, but for real, I enjoyed this one. I’m impressed with Leo Carew’s writing, and he did an amazing job giving life to some truly unique characters. Some of the secondary characters in this story are fucking amazing…Helmec, Gray, Pryce…oof. These are multi-layered characters who add so much to the narrative. These three in particular are just noble & fucking fierce & completely epitomize loyalty. And Roper is an outstanding main character. He’s deeply flawed…he fucks up, badly. Again & again. But he’s also possessed of this incredibly deep self-confidence. It’s like in his bones, no matter how difficult things seem, he knows he was made to become The Black Lord.

The Wolf really shines when it comes to its battle scenes…they are bold & brutal, but not needlessly gory. There are some truly clever “HOLY SHIT I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT JUST HAPPENED” moments here that had me smiling ear to ear. All in all, I think this is an incredibly impressive debut. While I had a few bones to pick, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to anyone looking for a pretty brutal & bleak military fantasy novel. I see a lot of Game of Thrones comparisons thrown around for this book…I mean, maybe if Game of Thrones was strictly about The Night’s Watch?

Either way, I dug this book. Leo Carew is an incredibly solid fantasy writer…the detail given to the outdoor scenes in this story is gorgeous, and the battle scenes are nothing short of bone-crunching. I’m eagerly awaiting The Spider!

Big thanks to Orbit Books for sending me this one ages ago!! Sorry for the delay!