A Companion to Wolves
Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
The basics
This is, as the authors describe, not the animal-companion book that you might have come to expect. They quite firmly take a lot of those tropes and stand them firmly on their head. I’ll join a number of other commentators here, and say that the two of them working together play beautifully to each other strengths: this book has evocative description, a sense of needing to keep your eyes open in case you miss something fascinating, and incredibly rich worldbuilding.
[I'll apologise here: my limited book budget means I do not yet own a copy of this, and the library copy had to go back before I got the brain to write this. I believe I'm accurate in terms of the summary/etc. below, but I'm not trying for most names or titles for fear of messing them up. The mix of language bases used - which I otherwise liked - meant that none of the precise terms stuck reliably in my memory and I keep second-guessing them.]
The basic premise is that there are trolls (who are nasty, and prone to destroying villages, killing people, and generally problematic.) There are villages with a geographic minor aristocracy - and there are the trellwolves and their human companions, who fight the trolls.
Each wolf bonds to a human - a male human - as it grows (but not instantly upon birth). While the wolf might survive the man, or the man the wolf (in which case, another bond may but does not always happen), it’s also a great loss. The wolves are governed by the alpha female - the queen wolf.
The story, in short, is the tale of Isolfr, who bonds to a young queen wolf, and of how they grow up together. Below the ‘more’ tag, I’m going to talk more about some details - I’m not actually talking about plot details as much as world-building details, but if you’re wanting to avoid spoilers, come back when you’ve read the book.
The actual coming-of-age pulled me in entirely (I admit, it’s a favorite theme of mine). That said, there is explicit sexuality in the book, some of it is fairly graphic (in the context of the wolves mating, and the effect it has on their bonded brothers) and that if you add the first two parts of the sentence together, yes, there are men having sex with men. Me, I think it’s totally appropriate in context, handled with a particular delicacy in some ways (as I discuss below), and made me think. But if you have issues with that, you probably want the warning. (It is possible to skip the page or two where the explicit stuff happens and pick up again and not miss too much, though you’ll miss a few minor hints of future plot developments.)
It’s a fantastic book, and one I think that will continue to deepen on re-reading. But really, I want to talk about other aspects of it now - like power, and ritualised roles, and informed consent, which is where we sort of hit spoilers. (Also, because I’m talking about this on the Pagan-focused book discussion blog, I’m talking about parts of this from that context, as you’ll see.)