Little Fur – A Mystery of Wolves

Isobelle Carmody's A Mystery of Wolves is a winter fantasy for 9 year olds about a tiny half-elf healer whose closest friend hasn't come home.

What happens

Little Fur is the last creature alive with elf blood in her. Her father was an elf, her mother a troll, and she lives in a scrap of wilderness hidden inside a huge human city, guarded by seven ancient trees that simply turn people's minds away.

Because she's part troll, she has to keep her feet on green growing things. Step onto stone or road and she loses the flow of earth magic for good.

She's a healer, and the best pages here are the quiet ones. A rabbit with a paw crushed by a falling branch, the bones eased back into line. A swan with engine oil in its feathers, washed in hot spring water. A cave wall dug full of little holes holding herbs, seeds and minerals, with an owlet and a family of fieldmice living in the spare ones.

Midwinter is coming, and with it the one night of the year when the old creatures gather in her wilderness. She's been getting ready for weeks.

Then a sick human collapses at the edge of the trees. And that night Little Fur dreams of Ginger, the grey cat whose spirit is tied to hers, backed against a stone wall with his fur matted and filthy, telling her to let him go.

This is the third of four books, and it's the sort of series that expects you to have been there. Ginger, Crow, the fox called Sorrow and the journey to the troll city all come with history attached. Your reader will follow it, but they'll get more out of it in order.

Two things are worth saying about the writing.

It's beautiful and it's slow. Carmody writes winter as a spell that puts half the world to sleep and thickens the air with dreams. Crow speaks in his own bent grammar and is a wonderful show-off. The owlet Gem says "Bad sick. Sick of badness" and means it.

It's also a proper step up. The sentences are long and the vocabulary is rich, and a newer reader will want this one read aloud rather than tackled alone. That isn't a fault. It's just useful to know in advance.

There's no violence on the page. What there is instead is a low, sad hum about damage. Roads that kill animals, oil in the water, a fox who was tortured by a human he loved, a human whose spirit is sick rather than his body. It's gentle, but it isn't cheerful, and a child who wants jokes will not find them here.

What to read next

If your reader wants to stay with her, Riddle of Green takes Little Fur out of the human city altogether and across the sea, with a lemur, a panther and a great many lemmings for company.