A lone wolf, Blacktail’s life is forever changed when he falls in love with a pet dog who soon dies at her owners’ hands. After taking his vengeance and going on the run to escape the humans hunting him, a mysteriously
powerful feline witch sends him on a quest to wake the Forest God, whose reawakening will bring the end of humanity and return dominion over the world to the beasts. On his epic journey, Blacktail will face many foes and make many allies, leaving legends in his wake that restore hope to animal-kind.
To be honest, I was not a Warrior Cats kid and I haven’t read any of the books, but I have heard a lot about it from friends and I feel like I can say with great confidence that this book is like Warrior Cats for adults in the best way possible. It really is an odyssey—even with the book being fairly short, Blacktail’s journey feels expansive and epic in a super compelling way. Strictly speaking, most of the book is just travel and usually I get pretty sick of the kind of episodic storytelling you get in travel narratives where it’s just meet character fight scene conversation because there’s a lack of cohesion, but Hawkins did a great job making each section feel like narrative beats contributing to Blacktail’s character development and not just stepping stones towards the conclusion of the journey.
I read and enjoyed Scott Hawkins’ debut, The Library at Mount Char, but I enjoyed Blacktail a lot more and found it to be a more well-constructed story. The Library at Mount Char is so unique that that alone makes it enjoyable, and there is a sense of order to the chaos, but I wouldn’t say you emotionally connect with the characters and it is kind of senselessly violent/disturbing. I’m not precious about disturbing subject matter in my books (in fact, I prefer it), but in The Library at Mount Char at times it feels like it’s just for shock value. Compare that to Blacktail, where the violence feels so genuine and inherent to the world that it almost isn’t disturbing because you have such a strong sense that among the animals this is the accepted way of things. It’s the way of the hunt, and in the context of Blacktail’s search for the Forest God, it’s sacred. I also sympathized a lot more with the characters in Blacktail than the characters in Mount Char. They aren’t human, and yet at their core the struggles that they face are familiar: Loss, abandonment, ambition, abuse, imprisonment, alienation, and fear. Hawkins does a good job striking a balance between making the perspectives, thought processes, and beliefs distinct enough that the narrators truly feel like animals, while also tying in emotions and conflicts that parallel human experiences enough for the reader to relate to them. I had kind of mixed feelings about the ending because it didn’t really loop back around in the way I might have hoped, but it didn’t detract from my overall reading experience so I’m not mad about it.
I was a little torn between giving this four or five stars, but I teared up while reading it and I feel like I’ll be thinking about it for a while so I’m happy to round up. Clearly, Scott Hawkins has established himself as a really unique and innovative storyteller, so I look forward to reading whatever he comes up with next!
Thank you to Scott Hawkins and Crown for this ARC in exchange for my full, honest review!
Happy reading!
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