Night of the Wolf
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars
While I recall the first of this series thrilling me with its Roman historicity and intrigue, I am left wondering if I enjoyed it so much because it was several years ago and my reading tastes were not nearly as refined, nor my sense of literary excellence so sharply honed. Borchardt really shares quite a lot with her sister Anne Rice in regards to style, meaning she tends toward the overwrought and over done. I wanted more from her characters, was rather bored with the usage of Caesar as a character and the plotting surrounding him, and felt like the historical detailing of food distracted from the flow of the novel – especially as I flipped through my unabridged Oxford dictionary to find out what piece of a pig’s lower intestine they were consuming.
The wolfish perspective provided by Maeniel, the dark gray eyes of innocence who transitions from wolf to man, was the most fascinating part of the novel, something I enjoyed because urban fantasy written now is almost entirely built upon humans becoming wolves and not the other way around, something I’ve always felt was lacking. The potential for using that perspective as a commentary on our world is vast, but unfortunately, Borchardt did so only shallowly.
Verbose Vantages 