The House of the Wolf is pretty clearly going to be about werewolves; the cover art would tell you that even if the back cover blurb didn’t tip you off. But it’s a werewolf novel so solidly rooted in the real lives of both humans and wolves that it almost doesn’t feel like the fantasy novel it is.
The novel introduces us to two characters: a young wolf, outcast from his pack, who finds himself strangely drawn to humans, and a young woman, Chantal Boisvert, who is also outcast from her “pack” in a way. An orphan, she has never fit in well with her mother’s family in Vermont, and knows nothing of her Quebecois father’s family. A trip to Quebec to reconnect with her roots uncovers far more than Chantal had imagined.
The werewolf lore here is well-thought-out and developed in a way that draws on the traditions of the French-Canadians loups-garous and Metis rougarou, as well as on the behavior of actual wolves in the wild. It’s inevitable that the two main characters, woman and wolf, will eventually meet up in a form that allows them to get to know each other, but the path taken to get there is full of surprising twists and turns. And who knew Quebecois society was absolutely rife with werewolves? (And yet, it makes a kind of sense…)
Compulsive Overreader 