Julie
Series: Julie of the Wolves, Book 2
By: Jean Craighead George / Narrated By: Christina Moore
Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
Really loved this sequel!
While it took me awhile to get into Julie of the Wolves (I thought Miyax was a bit of a wheedling whiner), I immediately took to this, the sequel, even tho’ it starts at the first book’s rather distressing end. At that ending, I’d found myself shouting, “No, Miyax, nooooo!” because I felt she was turning her back on everything true, everything dear.
Julie does indeed start out that way, where Julie leaves her Wolfpack behind to live with her father, he who no longer lives in tune with nature, and he who has even killed a beloved wolf-friend of Julie’s. Then too the man has taken a white wife, and Julie goes to great pains to pretend not to speak English around the woman as she doesn’t accept the role in her father’s life that the woman has come to play.
The story centers around Julie’s coming to terms with the new way of life taking over and superseding the native and traditional old ways. These were the ways she managed to live in tune with nature and coexisting with the wolfpack whilst surviving on her own. Her father Kapugen is now a much-respected leader of the village, and he’ll do anything to bring the village into “modernity” including killing wolves who threaten the musk ox herd he and others are raising for commerce and for their livelihoods. Then too his wife is pregnant, so he’s worried about that; famine has reached the land, leading the caribou the wolves depend on away and drawing wolves to the village herds.
Then too, Julie is becoming a young woman and has been spotted by Peter, a young man from Siberia. It’s he who gives her a whistle to use to draw critters for hunting while she’s rejoined her wolfpack, trying to lead them to the caribou herds that have migrated further away. Peter and Kapugen’s wife have encouraged Julie/Miyax to seek education and to join modern times. And what I like about the book and most definitely about Miyax is that, while fearing the slaughter of her wolf buddies, she’s nonetheless unwilling to give up the old ways of coexisting with the natural world around her.
Things come to a fevered pitch, and she tells her tale yet again of just how very much the wolves have done for her, how they saved her life many times over, and Kapugen has to make his own decisions. Once again, Christina Moore does a rock solid job with her performance (She has SUCH a warm voice, and I truly liked all her characters, even at the beginning where I was casting a squid’s eye at All Things Kapugen).
Julie is such a short listen, so you’ll find yourself done in no time flat and will most likely be ready for the, wait for it: NEXT book in Jean Craighead George’s series.
Need I say it? I’m DYING to get to the next one!!!
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.