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The alphabet game is nearly at an end.
V: The Best of Catherynne M. Valente, Volume One
W: Wolf Girl #1: Into the Wild
X: My Kindle has no books with a word starting with X in the title.
Wolf Girl #1: Into the Wild by Anh Do.
Quick synopsis: Something happens (a war?) and a girl ends up alone in the woods. She ends up with four "dogs" (three dogs and a wolf) and an eagle for friends.
Brief opinion: I DNFed this in 2023, so I'm not sure how it ended up on my Kindle again. My issue then was "Way too young for me and the story bored me" which held true two years later. It's so short though (about an hour of reading), this time I pushed through to finish it (which was a mistake).
Plot: Set in what seems modern times (there are cars) and the real world. Something happens during the night (the story never explains what, but maybe related to a war? All families packed up food and fled during the night, with explosions happening behind them). But roads get clogged when lots of people have to flee, so eventually the flow of traffic is halted by an accident.
As explosions get closer, Gwen's parents tells her and her sister to go run into the forest next to the road and keep running no matter what. The sister vanishes off the bat (for some reason the two of them don't stick together).
Gwen finds herself alone, but a golden (wolf) puppy leads her to water. Slowly she finds other dogs and ends up with a little pack of them. First four (three + wolf), then they find one more. Then she rescues an eagle chick and raises that.
After four years of living in the wild, the golden wolf brings her a locket with pictures of her family in it (that she had lost four years back), so she decides to try to go find other people.
Some bad men grab her, toss her into a truck, and the dogs/wolf/eagle chase after it.
The end. (Grumble)
Writing/editing: Both were fine.
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: The Amazon description calls this Middle Grade, but it had to be a lot younger than that (or maybe for "reluctant readers"?). It was super short, and even then most pages were a half-page of text at most, and even then what text there was was broken up by words that were drawn instead of in normal text. Like "POW!" and "BARK BARK!" and "RUN!". Also there was art on nearly every page.
The story played fast and loose with reality/facts. Like the eagle landing on the girl's unprotected arm and three dogs, a wolf, and the girl living on a handful of jerky. Also she became a master hunter VERY quickly. (But again, this story was meant for very young readers who wouldn't even notice those things.)
My biggest issue was that this story ended on a cliffhanger. This is a six book series, but I'm not going to continue on with it.
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: In 2023 I gave it two stars ("disliked") and my opinion hasn't changed. ⭐️⭐️. If I had been given this book when I was really young I probably would have loved it, but it did nothing for adult reader me.
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DNF #20: The Best of Catherynne M. Valente, Volume One by Catherynne M. Valente. 800 pages of short stories. 45 short stories. All by one author. Even in the best case that would have been a lot, but this author writes "weird" stuff in "weird" ways.
One story was about the time/space continuum taking the form of a boy. Not it as a boy, but just in the shape of one. So when it opened its mouth, the sound of a pulsar came out.
What if a nation were a person? The rest of the world/nations were normal, but one nation was actually a person?
Most of the stories had things like time not flowing normally, perspective not working like it usually would in stories, things like that.
In small doses, I might have liked more of these stories, but after a couple of them all I wanted was a "normal" story with an actual story/plot in it and a typical flow of time, etc.
