3 stars, a decent hybrid of survival and science fiction
Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves
Meg Long
The Iditarod, but in space.
Set on the frozen planet of Tundar, an annual race occurs to reach a mining operation and collect a valuable resource — exocarbon. Sena lost her mothers to the race, and wants nothing to do with it. Content to carve out her life as a roguish thief with no ties to anyone, she’s managed along just fine thank you very much, until suddenly she is coerced into tending to the injured fighting wolf of the planet’s most notorious and influential crime boss, forging a bond that sees her fleeing into the night with the wolf Iska in tow and back on the race track to escape.
I have no issues with the blurb given for this book, it truly does a wonderful job setting up the story, but it takes Long more than half of the book to even get past this initial premise into the actual survival arc. At times, it truly felt like a slog to get through, but once past it the survival portion of the story was incredibly well-written and with great pacing.
Due to being a standalone debut novel, there was a limitation in what could be revealed and I think Long missed an opportunity for building into something bigger. The good and the bad are pretty cut and dry, and provide a rather heavy handed metaphor for capitalism/colonialism and the violence they bring to Indigenous people’s land. Unfortunately, even the people standing in for the Indigenous perspective, while spurned and hated by the dominant society, are revealed to be space colonizers too pretty early on. That in turn made certain things ring hollow for me, like why Sena was given such a hard time by strangers if she had somehow not known them prior to them calling her slurs. Given the limited descriptions of the characters, she didn’t look out of place.
The bond she forms with Iska is deep and beautiful, and speaks to my inner child who still longs for the moment of finding an animal that just gets me. There were definitely moments that I think size wasn’t accounted for at all times (and was my issue with a certain fantasy author’s work who I DNF’d), and did impact my ability to visualize the story at times. Wolves are anywhere from 4-6 feet in their length, and it felt like Iska’s description was a little all over the place, especially when it came to confined spaces.
The other characters in the book have little depth unfortunately, as Sena spends so much time keeping her distance from them they don’t get to shine. For a book purporting the promise of “found family” on its inside flap, I was disappointed. I think there was a way to marry survival and family so much more, but it likely needed to be a longer book. In some ways, it felt familiar in that stakes were high, there were deaths and bodily injury, and the elements played a massive part in the second half in a character vs nature way.
Long’s writing style, while not nuanced to the point of Hemmingway pseudo-simplicity, wasn’t overly flowery either. Sometimes I’d get lost on the page, especially as action was taking place, as she’d interject thought or emotion where there was no time and find myself skipping to where the next thing happened. Sena reads like a teenager though, one forced to grow up too soon, though her anger feels well-aged and well-directed for someone only 17 years old.
Overall, I will likely hand this to my readers looking for a survival story, or an off-beat science fiction pick. I’m not entirely writing Long off as an author, but I won’t be blanketly putting whatever she’s publishing next onto my shelves either. For a better survival story, I recommend The Speed of Falling Objects. For a better science-fiction story, I recommend Skyward.
The Little Book Witch 