#and my child brain went aww the woof and the bear love each other :)

[solargoose]

This is my warrior cats blog but it's also my general xenofiction blog, and I'm reading various middle grade - young adult xenofiction books that I either haven't read or read a long time ago and I just finished my reread of Wolves of the Beyond.

And there are a lot of elements I could talk about (I forgot just how bleak these books are) but instead I'm going to focus on one weird detail:

Were we supposed to know who Maud's father was?

Like they make a point to say her father must have had red fur, and maybe I just wasn't paying attention but I don't remember that many red wolves? I checked the wiki but they don't know either, and there aren't many other red wolves listed, and the red wolves (or reddish ones) that are there don't make much sense for Banja. There's a couple with unknown fur colors, but that's not satisfying.

I remember as a kid (and now during my reread) thinking Rags was going to be her father, but when he shows up they don't seem to know each other?

And it's possible it's not meant to be anything, or it was from a plotline that got scrapped. It's just the specific detail of her father must have been red because her fur is too red for him to have had any other fur color. That's just a weird amount of detail for it to be meaningless. Like calling out his fur color instead of just going oh I wonder who her dad was.

The timing was around the same time Rags was introduced, which makes me think he was supposed to be her father and it got scrapped at some point.

#wolves of the beyond #wolves of the beyond spoilers #these books really are bleak though I forgot about that #Kathryn Lasky really said hey what if I made a kids series depicting the brutality of a deeply ableist society living in a harsh landscape #full of starvation and natural disasters with no escape (unless you like canabalism) and also there's a death cult at one point :) #and my child brain went aww the woof and the bear love each other :) #but also during my reading I've read some of Lasky's other stuff and this is just her style. Animals going through bleak harsh times #The horse ones are set during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and includes the horrors of colonialism and animal abuse. #The owl ones include kidnapping brainwashing child labor child soldiers child abuse and owl nazis. #I haven't read the polar bear ones but I imagine it's probably about global warming and nuclear warfare or something.