Nashoga is a wolf driven from his pack by a rival, who is for some reason accepted as leader by the pack instead of being killed by them as a group. Nashoga then ends up befriending an elk named Buck, and together they seek to reclaim the pack and reunite him with his lost love.
The writing style was quite uneven and unpolished (I got the sense that the author was fairly young when she wrote it), and there were a few grammatical mistakes. One character is introduced with blue eyes, but is described as having brown eyes when Nashoga recounts meeting her in flashback. His friendship with Buck develops far too quickly and easily. The book seems like it’s set in the real world until over halfway through, when there’s suddenly a magic pool with water-sprites living in it.
Sadly, this book is full of the same old factual errors that constantly appear in wolf fiction – wolves with blue eyes and sharp claws, adults sleeping in dens, packs consisting of random unrelated individuals, animals using human terms and gestures. Nashoga also manages to defeat a mountain lion, a much stronger animal, in a fight. The author doesn’t seem to know much about elk, either. She states that a male elk is called a buck, when the correct name is bull. Buck is monogamous, and has antlers regardless of the time of year. He says multiple times that “I’m not a deer, I’m an elk,” which does not make sense, since elk are a species of deer. It’s like a dog saying: “I’m not a dog, I’m a Labrador.”
Not the worst book I’ve read by a long shot, but not good.