Overview:
The first daughter is for the Throne.
The second daughter is for the Wolf.
For fans of Uprooted and The Bear and the Nightingale comes a dark, sweeping debut fantasy novel about a young woman who must be sacrificed to the legendary Wolf of the Wood to save her kingdom. But not all legends are true, and the Wolf isn’t the only danger lurking in the Wilderwood.
As the only Second Daughter born in centuries, Red has one purpose—to be sacrificed to the Wolf in the Wood in the hope he’ll return the world’s captured gods. [Read More…]
Would I Recommend It?
Not as a top favorite of fantasy books, definitely not.
Just as a good enough read with a neat twist of Little Red Riding Hood incorporated into the whole Wolf, Red, Wilderwood, & evil Queen storyline.
Thoughts?
I liked Red. I liked the relationship and romantic build between Red and Eammon.
I felt that the whole blood and roots and ripping and growing and magic grew tiring. Like a 100 pages could be ripped out of the book due to lack of content if not for the labored descriptions of the roots and cutting and bleeding and changing and tearing. As much as I repeated myself here in these two sentences, so does the book over 369 Nook book pages.
Perhaps maybe what the book is missing is deeper dialogue between the characters. More content needed there. And the whole “I don’t want to hurt you” concept–like, get over yourself already. But Red did a pretty good job of calling Eammon on his martyrdom bullshit.
It’s not a book I’ll add to my book shelf. Thank you Spokane County Library for my digital borrow. I may or may not be back for book #2. Probably eventually will out of simple curiosity.
Random Thought
I often felt hungry for the characters. They all seem to have an issue with eating food to nourish themselves. What is up with that? Like… a slice of bread and you go all the way to dinnertime and you’re still not hungry? HOW?!? Whole lot of coffee and wine drinking, but like no food.
(And perhaps the food scenes stood out more cause I’m reading Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life, concurrently, where the main character/author is bulimic.)
Quotable Quotes
“You had to be a whole person to be worth mourning. She’d never been that to her mother.”-page 15 of 395 (Red)
“It hung to her knees, smelled of old books and coffee and cinnamon-bite of fallen leaves, still warm from where he’d worn it.” – page 72 (Red)
“She nodded, not trusting herself to fit words into the space between them.” – page 119 of 395 (Red)
“People created stories to fill the gaps they didn’t understand, and religion grew up around it like rot on a fallen tree.” – page 161
“Arick, passionate and brash, whose brain was the last organ he made decisions with.” – page 204 (Red)
“And an extra layer of resonance, buried as deep as she could send it: My mother is dead, and I’m not sad. – page 205 (Neve)
“I don’t think I can mourn her,” Red murmured. “I mourn the idea of her, maybe. The gap between what a mother is supposed to be and what she was.” She blinked hard against the burn in her eyes, shook her head. “That probably doesn’t make sense.” (Red)
“It does. Sometimes you don’t mourn people so much as you mourn who they could’ve been.” (Eammon) – page 216
“Red was a warped puzzle piece, her changes nearly too subtle to see, but enough to keep her from fitting back into the place she’d left.” – page 299 (Red)
“Fear makes us all do foolish things.” – page 329 (Red)
Book:
For the Wold (The Wilderwood #1)
Author:
Hannah Whitten
Genre:
Fiction / Fantasy / Romance – Light
My Rating:
3 Stars
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