Review: The Wolf Road

The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Just you and me, Elka girl, Trapper said to me, it can only be you and me. 

The Fall, the Reformation, the Damn Stupid, has happened and humans now live in a dystopian future that has them going back to hunters, gatherers, and rough survival times. Left with her nana at age seven after her parents set off to find their riches mining for gold, our main character gets taken in by Kreagar Hallet and named Elka. 

The story starts off with a young adult Elka hiding in a tree from Kreagar and you're wondering what has happened. The story then goes back to the beginning of Elka starting off with Trapper (Kreagar). There's the immediate sense of unease with a seven year old girl staying alone with a man but, told all from Elka's point-of-view, the reader just sees him as a gruff and rough wilderness man who is teaching a young girl to live, fend, and survive in the current times. Since Elka has never had a formal education, the story is told in a vernacular that reflects that and gives the tone a rough and naive sense. Elka talks about how Trapper teaches her to hunt, describing the skinning of the animal and eventual eating of it. 

The sense of unease creeps back in as we time jump ahead and a woman comes back to the cabin with slightly older Elka, Trapper has strictly enforced that no one knows where they live and even though he acts nicely with the woman, when she leaves with him to go back home, the reader and Elka don't have a good feeling. Things come to a crash when Elka is around seventeen and she sees a wanted poster for Trapper in town and the magistrate, a woman name Jennifer Lyons, asks if Elka recognizes the man, Kreagar, from the poster and tells her that he is wanted for murdering eight woman and a child. The child was Lyon's son. Elka is shook but pretends to not know Kreagar but Lyon followed her home and ends up burning their cabin and Elka sees scalps and a box of Kreagar's murderous keepsakes that brings to front that he is guilty. 

The doctor had taught me all I needed to know 'bout the rest a my life in that one act. He was giving me a chance to do the right thing like he had. To face down Kreagar and face down my past 'stead a running from 'em both. I just had to be brave enough to do it. 

The story then pivots to Elka running from Kreagar, Lyons, and her own mind. Along the way she meets a bunch of men that are horrible and even is saved by someone she thinks was Kreagar at one point. Elka's trying to get to the mining city she thinks her parents went to and it all feels a little haphazard, which with how broken her memories are, fits the tone. There's the horrible men but Elka also befriends a wolf and another girl Penelope and they end up taking turns saving each other, teaching Elka a different side of humanity that she didn't learn from being raised by Trapper. 

Around 70%, Elka and Penelope make it to her parent's mining town and actually find the claim they were on, it doesn't quite have a happy ending but Elka and Penelope decide to try and scrape out a living there as a man and his son they befriended on the journey there, also lives in the town. Even as they decide this, the creep of Kreagar and Lyons grows closer and closer. Some enemy of my enemy happens and Elka finally has her stand with Kreagar. 

The writing style voice of Elka's speech as she tells the story was a bit of a struggle for me and some of Elka's growing in the second half wasn't paced quite right but this story definitely had some tense atmosphere to it as Kreagar hung out in the shadows. Along with the final physical showdown with Kreagar, the story was clearly leading up to Elka's repressed memories finally coming to the surface. I thought Elka dealing with this emotional trauma was really rushed at the end and it was a little disappointing that all that leading up was kind of wasted. The ending brought in some humanity from Penelope in this dystopian world and while Elka never had a fair chance because of being raised by Trapper/Kreagar, she goes off into the horizon with a title friend she met along the way.

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