The Wolf and the Woodsman

by Ava Reid

I wake sometime in the morning, when the sky is as pink as the shell of an ear, delicate and raw.

so.many.shitty.similes 😑

“And for what? Why did you hate me so much? Was it because I didn’t stay down when you shoved me, or because I didn’t swallow every insult you hurled at me? Did you sleep more soundly at night when you knew that I was weeping in my bed, three huts away?”

Tell her! 👏🏽

The veil of white vanishes from Katalin’s eyes. She sits up, straightening herself, and amidst all the tremulous rumbling of the crowd, sets her lambent blue gaze on Nándor. “They’re coming,” she says. “The pagans. All of them, from all the villages. They’re going to storm the capital.”

👏🏽

With a tightness in my chest I watch Tuula stroke the bear’s furry head, carefully loosening her chains and removing her muzzle, while Bierdna twitches her wet nose with contentment.

The woodsmen took the bear as prisoner, too? Lol! I overlooked a lot of silly things that the author wrote for plot purposes rather than making sense, but this is ridiculous.

I gasp, lips parting as I strain for breath, and then he sticks his hand into my open mouth, tugging one of my loose molars free with two fingers.

This book is so ridiculous. 😑

“Leave her be,” Gáspár says. His gaze flickers to me briefly, just one caught-breath moment that loops between us like black thread. “You’re going to lose, Nándor. Most of your Woodsmen have already been slain, and it will take weeks for the rest of the army to make its way here from Akosvár. If you surrender now, and call off the rest of your Woodsmen, I will spare your life.”

These characters are all annoying me at this point. Why are you bargaining? He’s shown over and over why he is ~~irredeemably evil~~. Stab that guy *in the throat* 😐

“A mutilated half-breed, tainted by his mother’s foreign blood and poisoned by his love for a wolf-girl. Is it any wonder why Father balked at handing you the crown?”

Did he, though? Didn't seem like he did, but I guess Evil McEvilson is just trying to goad.

My arrow looses through the air, quick as a wing beat, and buries itself in Nándor’s throat.

Would she have been able to have a shot at that part of him when he was behind his brother to threaten to cut his throat? I dunno about the mechanics of this, but whatever, I guess. So much of this book breaks immersion because things happen when the author needs them to rather than following logic and a train of actions. Like, Evike could have logically killed Nandor way before, in the room she was staying in at the palace, by damaging his hands then moving to his throat. There was nothing stopping her but plot contrivance. The author wanted her to use the skill she cultivated to kill him so that's what happened.

Ruby-bright droplets limn his collarbone, like icicles on eaves.

No, they don't. Those things aren't the same consistency and shape at all.

Someday an archivist will shelve a book about the siege of Király Szek in the palace library, and it will document the lives lost, the ground gained, the treaties signed, and the maps redrawn. But it will not say anything about this: a wolf-girl and a Woodsman holding each other in the blood-drenched aftermath, and the clouds cleaving open above them, letting out a gutted light.

Of course she has to ruin this paragraph with a nonsense simile. 🫥