It took me a very long time to finish this book. It’s not because it’s a terrible book – it’s beautifully written, with a large focus on the Scotland environment, and the flora and fauna found there. McConaghy does a fantastic job describing Scotland and Alaska wilderness. I appreciate the love of the wolves, the desire to ensure that the wilderness and the animals found within are conserved. I’m not an outdoors person, so I’m guessing quite a few things were lost on me, and to be honest, I had trouble identifying with Inti and her principles. Potential Spoilers ahead…
Inti and Aggie have a fairly bizarre upbringing, with a mother that’s hyper-focused on defending battered women in Australia, and a father who is hyper-focused on living off the land and conserving it for the future (following a stint as a logger). They’re twins, so communication between them is pretty special, with made up languages and signals that only they know. Inti has a condition that results in her being able to feel the pain others feel buy just looking at them (humans and animals). It gets really confusing, though. She feels what her sister is going through when abused by her boyfriend, she feels the pain of the prey that the wolves catch, and she also feels the pain of animals who have died already (the first major depiction of this condition is when she watches her father clean and dress a rabbit that was caught – it’s already dead, so how does she feel the knife???).
For a while, I enjoyed the descriptions of the Scotland wilderness and the wolves. But again, I didn’t identify with Inti – she wasn’t too redeemable in my eyes, first of all, and more often than not was fairly off-putting. Her interactions with Aggie tended to be confusing, which at first were great, but after a while were confusing just to be confusing. The only character we were supposed to care about for the first 2/3rds of the book were Inti, which was apparent, since nearly all of the other characters were one dimensional. Not a lot of interaction between Inti and anyone other than her sister and the local police chief – the love interest, which could have been predicted in the first 10 pages of the book.
The intrigue following the death of a not so great guy could have really driven the book forward, and quickly. But instead, it plodded forward slowly, and if I’m honest, boringly. I ended up putting this down for a solid two weeks. Inti tries to figure out who could have killed the man (she found him dead, and went ahead and buried him, because of course she did), but half-heartedly, and really only to determine if her love interest was involved. The majority of the book bounces back and forth between her trying to find the truth (that doesn’t implicate her love interest or her beloved wolves), or watching the progress of the wolves being introduced into the wild. And so much more time is spent on the wolves…
Not only that, but it’s a really depressing book, too! Inti doesn’t have a lot of hope for the world, or for herself. Her love interest doesn’t either, and his outcome is pretty sad. Her sister is, shall we say, damaged (for a good reason) with no hope of recovering.
This is definitely not an uplifting book, and is not going to be one that I pick up again. In fact, it’s already in the pile to be donated to the local library.
Overall, it’s not terrible – the depictions of the environment are beautiful, and the end of the book picks up speed. Some people might like that. It had potential, but I’m not a fan.