The Wolf Wilder

Katherine Rundell's The Wolf Wilder is a snowbound Russian adventure for 9 year olds about a girl whose job is teaching wolves to stop being pets.

What happens

Feodora is dark all the time and stormy only when she thinks it's absolutely necessary. Which is fairly often.

She lives with her mother in a wooden house in the forest, the walls layered with sheep's wool against the cold. Feo has painted the hurricane lamps every colour in her paintbox, so the house throws red and green and yellow light out into the trees.

Rich people in the city buy wolves, get bored of them and send them out here. Marina untames them. Feo is learning how.

Then somebody knocks on the door. It sounds like a man trying to dig a hole in the wood with his knuckles.

General Rakov has brought two soldiers and a dead elk, and he wants a hundred rubles for it. Marina hasn't got a hundred rubles. So he goes through the house instead.

He throws Feo's painted lamp at the ceiling. He turns the dining table over. He tells his men to take the paintings, and Feo hands over her grandmother's gold chain to get them out of the door faster. Then he gives the order. From now on, when the city sends wolves, they shoot them.

Reading it is mostly the pleasure of Rundell's sentences. They're short and exact and every so often one lands sideways. Marina's face is built on the blueprint used for snow leopards. A wolf's breath smells of spit and silver coins.

These are not storybook wolves, either. Feo's three live in the ruins of a stone chapel among headless saints, and when she skis in they're eating ravens and spattering the statue of Mary with blood. She waits, because you don't interrupt wolves at dinner even if they're your best friends. She's grown up picking pine needles out of their fur and old meat from their teeth.

Some plain facts before you hand it over. Rakov tells Feo that a child with a stare like hers would be beaten. He kicks the dead elk hard enough to make its legs flail. Marina leaves the room and comes back with a bruise on her cheek that wasn't there before. And the last thing he says on his way out is that if they see the child with a wolf, they'll shoot the wolf and take the child.

It's frightening in a very controlled way, which is exactly why it works. A child who needs animals to be safe and adults to be sensible will find that first chapter horrible. A child who loves watching someone small square up to someone enormous will be on Feo's side by page ten.

What to read next

For more wolves, and another girl whose home is taken over by a cold adult with the law behind her, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase hands Bonnie and her cousin to a governess named Miss Slighcarp.