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Wolfskin
by Juliet Marillier

 

Reviewer: Amazonbombshell  from Long Beach, CA

 
WOLFSKIN is the fourth offering from extraordinary historical novelist Juliet Marillier, and if she can continue in the tradition she has established thus far, I have hope for many more. Ms. Marillier has a gift for spinning tales such as one might hear from a particularly skilled storyteller of old, sitting with friends and family around a fire on a long winter night hundreds of years ago. We don't have many such professional bards today, but we have not lost our taste for good stories, nor our need of people to tell them. In our modern world, the printed word has reached its highest known distribution, and our modern bards have turned to that medium to entertain and to teach us with their tales. Ms. Marillier's Sevenwaters Trilogy (which, if you have not yet, you must read) is a collection of such powerful stories, and her newest offering, WOLFSKIN, is nearly as good.

The unlikely hero of the story is a Viking "Berserker," one of the legendary Norse warriors who went shrieking into the forefront of battle, blindly and lethally courageous. Its heroine is a young woman -- a daughter of the royal line and a priestess of the mysteries -- who belongs to an ancient people of the Orkney islands, a people so shadowed by history that we know little about them today. Other characters include the brave and tragic king of the Orkneys, a Viking chieftain with a bold dream of settlement in a far off land, and the warrior's clever and dangerous friend, who has saved his life and sworn with him a bond of brotherhood in blood, and who does not hesitate to call in his debts. How these characters come together is a long tale of friendship, sorrow, rage, grief, terror, magic, and deepest love. It is an exploration of the value of life and the strength of a promise made.

Compared to other works of historical fiction, WOLFSKIN ranks with the very best. Compared to the Sevenwaters Trilogy, which is perhaps the most powerful and compelling fiction I have read, it is very slightly lacking. Some elements of plot seem to pass too quickly, and the reader is left wondering why, if they were so important, they were over with so little ceremony. Sometimes that effect seems to me intentional, meant to make us feel as the characters do, but at others it disrupts the flow of an otherwise excellent story.

As for the characters, they lack nothing; they live in your mind even when the book is not in front of you, and as usual what makes Ms. Marillier's tale so powerful is the sheer emotional impact. If you spend time with this book and you have feelings, you will cry. You may laugh and sigh and otherwise feel what goes on, but Ms. Marillier specializes in sorrow, and this book cannot be experienced without tears -- of eyes or heart, or both. I would recommend plenty of time and perhaps some tissues to hand as you really get into the story. If you are separated from a loved one, you might want to wait until he or she is back with you before you begin; this is a tale of many kinds of heartbreak. It's easy to think I'm exaggerating here, but the power of human emotion is perhaps the greatest on earth: it makes us what we are, and shapes our world and our lives. This story is about that, in a way, and our reactions to it, and to others, are about that power, too.

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