A Wolf Called Wander
By: Rosanne Parry / Narrated By: Kirby Heyborne
Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
A knee-jerk Boo at the beginning smooths into a jolly good Listen!
It’s always an odd feeling to find yourself cheering on and rooting for the Hero: When he’s savagely delivering the Killing Bite to some poor, unsuspecting elk. Disembowelment? Dismemberment? Sucking the marrow outta newly crunched-through bones?
Oh huzzah, and three cheers for Swift/Wander!
But seriously—I’d not read the Publisher’s Summary when A Wolf Called Wander was on sale over at Kobo; I’d simply looked at the wonderful cover art, and I snatched it up, all posthaste-like.
And pretty much almost immediately disliked it: I blame author Bobbie Pyron and her woeful A Pup Called Trouble also having Kirby Heyborne as narrator, as I CERtainly can’t blame m’self for buying stuff, all posthaste-like. You see, both books open with rambunctious pups, and here, his name is Swift at first because he’s fleet of foot. Swift also happens to have sibling rivalry issues with the dominant pup; so as Heyborne was doing this little pup angsty voice, I was remembering Trouble and what a toad he was (No offense to toads). Oh nooooo, thought I to m’self: Almost 4-hours of this!
But then author Rosanne Parry adds real wonder, and very real angst to the story. And true affection as well. Swift truly loves his family, despite the fact that he sooo wants to top his older brother, and he feels pangs of jealous anger every now and then when he finds himself bested yet again. But his youngest brother, I’m considering the “runt” of the litter, is nothing but trusting and loyal.
And see? Parry has us considering runts, and packs, and territory, and so much of that ilk that I wasn’t at all surprised when I (Finally!) DID read the P. Summary and discovered A Wolf Called Wander was based upon the life of OR-7, a wolf sometimes known as Journey whom naturalists tracked as he traveled 1,000 miles throughout the Pacific Northwest. Nobody knows why OR-7 started his wayfaring, but Parry crafts violent trauma for Swift’s departure from his Pack and his home. As brutal Life starts happening to him, it’s written so well how Swift discovers the brutality of other animals and of the environment, how we slowly start to work out what he’s experiencing as everything is so new, so vivid, so deadly.
Whether it be highways that smash and kill, massive forest fires that rage and destroy, or (Especially) mankind who track from the skies and who shoot to kill, Swift slowly becomes a wolf who calls himself Wander. Well done! A grand story with itty bitesized bits of science and lore and accuracy woven into and fleshing out our journey with the Hero.
And make no mistake about it: Yup, he’s a carnivore, but he’s our Hero. Kirby Heyborne does indeed depict him as anxious and rather strident as a pup, but then he has this pup morph into a survivor, one with a decent heart still intact. Add to that, Heyborne throws back his head and Hooooooowwwwls!!! with wild abandon, and a true howl is never wasted on me! Never a dull minute with old Kirby, a man who does Young Adult fiction with the best of them; a man who -apparently- does Kids books super well also.
Yessss, there are blood and guts spattered a bit here and there, but a wolf has to eat. Plus, Wander’s father instilled in his pups a code of honor on what animals can be taken, and which would be the coward’s way through hunger. And always, if one kills for food, one offers gratitude for the sacrifice the newly blood-spattered have made, taking one for Nature’s team.
All said, all done? Nifty little book, a trifle fraught in the beginning, but it smoothed out, and I was not so much charmed as I was newly-educated. So maybe that might be a trifle boring for the younger kids amongst us, but hey! It’s never about the Kids….
It’s all about meeeeee…!
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