Reviews with content warning for Animal death - Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves: A Novel

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Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves: A Novel by Meg Long

18 reviews

alexandra73's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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llamareads's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I’m a sucker for kid-and-their-dog books, and this is a high-stakes scifi version of that. It’s the perfect book for reading while snowed in and cuddling your own dog.

“No wolves. No sleds. No racing.” I say it automatically despite the lump in my throat.
“Foolish rule for life on a planet that revolves around those three things,” she quips.”

Tundar, an Edge World, that has near constant electrical storms and a frigid climate. Corpos – giant corporations – attempted to terraform the world once, but just made it worse, exacerbating the weather and making the wildlife even more deadly. Sena grew up a child of two worlds and none, the daughter of an ex-racer, who trained the genetically engineered vonenwolves for the famous Tundar race, and a scavver, who believes that the race, to mine a rare ingredient, is unethical. She grew up learning how to care for injured vonenwolves and the scavver ways of living with the planet. But after her mothers die in the race, Sena refuses to have anything to do with the race anymore. On a world that revolves around the race, that means she’s left with pickpocketing and not much else, and before long she’s in trouble with one of the crime bosses.

“They think they can just take a piece of Tundar without giving anything back. But that’s not how it works here. Nothing taken, nothing given.”

Sena is honestly half-feral herself. Traumatized and determined to be independent, even as a young teen, Sena’s cut herself off from anyone and anything that could get between her and somehow earning enough money to leave the planet. She’s impetuous, frequently acting or speaking before she thinks, which lands her into trouble about as often as you’d expect. Sena’s constantly leaping from one bad situation to another, and that’s what drives most of the book’s plot. And while she’s not afraid to fight for what she wants, she’s also got firm lines she won’t cross. Her scavver äma taught her to respect life, even that of vonenwolves, whom everyone else seems to view as expendable components. It’s that connection with the wolves that leads her to get involved with Iska, an injured fighting wolf that belongs to one of the crime bosses. Sena’s a loner, and the last thing she wants is a connection to anyone, including a wolf, but her continued survival on Tundar depends on joining a racing team, and Iska seems to have her own ideas.

“Sometimes you don’t get to pick your family. Sometimes, they show up and pick you and you have to embrace it. And that wolf picked you.”

The slow build of the relationship between Sena and Iska was one of my favorite parts of the book. Watching Sena slowly accept her trauma – and understand that accepting help from others isn’t a weakness – was the heart of the book. The world building was surprisingly interesting for something that’s, well, just a scifi version of Alaska. I mean, Tundar is, after all, just “tundra” with one letter switched, and a lot of the fauna Sena encounters have Earth analogs, like reindeer and polar bears. Vonenwolves, in fact, are hybrids of the native vonen mixed with Earth wolf and dog DNA. They’re genetically engineered to pull sleds and not much else. The secondary characters were also fun. Remy – and her sense of humor – and Pena were my favorites. Where the book faltered was in the pacing. Sena is constantly faced with the consequences of her impetuousness, hopping from one disaster to another, so it’s not like nothing is happening, but some of those threads and characters never felt fully developed. It takes about half of the book before we even get to the race, but wow, once that happens, the book really picks up. The author’s prose is evocative of the snowy wastelands Sena and her team have to cross, and it made me very happy to be huddled up under a blanket with a warm drink.

“We race the cold and night, my wolf and I.”

Overall, while it takes a while to get going, this book was full of action and heart, and I particularly loved the ending. I would happily read a sequel! This is a very promising debut and I’m excited to see what this author comes up with next.

I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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jessiewolf's review against another edition

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adventurous tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes

4.5

This fast-paced, action-packed book hit all the right spots for me. Girl on adventure? Check. Survival in icy tundra? Check. WOLVES? Check!! Sena faces obstacle after obstacle as she resists a legacy that seems to be her fate: racing in a deadly journey on an icy planet with wolf hybrids being used as sled dogs. Note that there is animal abuse, but it happens almost entirely off-page. Animals and humans also face danger and violence from nature and other animals.

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readswithrachel's review against another edition

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adventurous tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

If you like the sound of Han Solo meets Baltic, you’ll lie this book. It’s light scifi on an ice planet with a thief trying to get off the planet, and a sled dog race. And commentary on capitalism. Very atmospheric and a good choice if you want a book that’ll make you feel the cold.

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sarahmreads's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Sena is fighting for her life on Tundar, an ice planet separate from Old Earth that is known for its sled races. She despises the races since her mothers had died in their last race, and she especially despises the vonenwolves that help make it happen. However, when the mob boss she works under has an injured wolf, he tasks Sena with helping it get back to full health, or else he will throw her in the race. Will Sena comply, or will she end up in the same fate as her mothers?

The worldbuilding is perfect for readers who want to get into science fiction stories but don't want t be completely thrown into a new world. A lot of the systems are similar to our world, especially the idea of the sled racing and a bunch of other elements, but still has a lot of elements unfamiliar to us that are explained pretty well in my opinion, such as genetic modification. I will admit that some things felt a little bit forced just because they fit well with a specific part of the story. Example with minor spoilers: one of the characters is revealed to be a genopath, a human genetically experimented and modified on to basically be a better version of a human. Yet, when it is revealed, it's like Sena already knew about this but just didn't tell the reader. Not only that, but it's also not mentioned anywhere else in the story until this moment, so it feels forced in just for an additional layer of depth.

This story moved extremely slow for me, mainly due to the fact that a lot of the same stuff keeps happening over and over. This includes Sena sneaking around bases, Sena being aggravated, Sena grieving her mothers, and Sena constantly checking her surroundings after one noise. It felt so repetitive, and as a result it really lessened the impact of these things and the bigger implication of them. Sure, the book did have some great moments of suspension and tension, but their impact just didn't have as strong as a punch on me, to the point where I was like "oh okay, we're doing this again." Also, the plot twist at the end was extremely predictable, at least for me.

Speaking of Sena grieving her mothers, I want to talk about Sena as a character. For me, she wasn't the strongest main character. Yes, she can fight and I was extremely impressed by her knowledge of races and also the world of Tundar. However, those were the only real pluses I could attribute to her. She's extremely sheltered as a person and still kind of is at the end. She was basically defined by her mothers' deaths throughout the entire story, like you couldn't go ten pages without her mothers being brought up. As a result, Sena felt just completely defined by her trauma and nothing else as a person, which was extremely hard to read since I couldn't completely connect to her.

A good portion of this book is also bonding between Sena and the wolf she's tasked to heal, Iska. I liked their tension a lot at the beginning of the story, but it seemed to mellow out too quickly for my liking. Iska was trained to be a fighting wolf, and Sena grew up raising sled wolves, so they come from two completely different backgrounds. But when one saves the other's life, that's when stuff shifts. But it comes too quickly of a shift, and when you think a bond is starting to form it's yanked back in progression. It grew too fast when there should have been a more gradual progression with their relationship.

The characters were also mainly split into two categories: those who are actually good, and the assholes who have no redeeming qualities. I usually like my "asshole" characters to have some depth to them besides their main quality trait being to piss off the main character. As a result, their words and actions didn't have much of an impact on me, which sucks because a lot of their purpose is to be racist towards the indigenous peoples of Tundar, which Sena genetically is. Maybe the purpose of it was to show how Indigenous peoples can become desensitized to racist slurs and comments, but that is not my place to say as I am not a person of Indigenous heritage. I can't also comment on the representation of Indigenous peoples as a white person.

Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves is a good starter science fiction novel but not the best when it comes to execution, with heavily repetitive actions and messy characterization.

I received a copy of this novel as an e-ARC from NetGalley. Any and all thoughts and opinions are my own.

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