The Wolves of Winter had all these quotes on the back about how literary and scintillating-prose and profound-characters it was. Normally I’m not a giant fan of postapocalyptic virus novels–the genre is super played out–but pickings were slim at the library, so I picked it up.
On the plus side, I finished it.
But it’s really a bog-standard genre novel. I don’t think a single thing in it surprised me pleasantly.
There was one major unpleasant surprise, though. The characters live in the far north of Alaska, post-apocalyptically, and they are all pioneerish and stuff. They hunt, they gather, they farm root vegetables. And the mom, ever the resourceful one, makes a soothing herbal tea for the family out of rhododendron leaves.
I mentioned this to my daughter, because I know her interests, and her jaw dropped. “But–but THOSE ARE POISONOUS!” she cried. (she’s a huge nerd about poisonous plants, which is as awesome and unsettling as you’d think).
Yes. Yes, they are. So either the mom is trying to murder her family and has been attempting the murder for years, and it otherwise never comes up in the book; or the author really, really didn’t do his basic background research.
A tiny atmospheric detail like that shouldn’t bother me so much, but the book wasn’t good enough to ask for forgiveness.