Review: Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves by Meg Long

 

I have had this on my Netgalley shelf since it released and I am just now getting to it. I honestly should have read this when it came out because I did not own two dogs then. The ending of this had me crying like a damn baby. 

This is about a girl named Sena who loves on a stormy ice planet named Tundar. She is an orphan because her moms died in a race for this resource that is very sought after on this planet. There are corporations and syndicate bosses who go after this resource year after year and it is a very deadly race. Sena is against the race because it killed her moms but also because of her heritage. She is part Scavver and part non native. Her mom worked for the corporations and was about to die in a race when she met a scavver who ended up being exiled because she saved her life. 

Sena is a pickpocket and thats how we first meet her. She hides from two corpos who are chasing her and she ends up getting into a cage with an injured fighting wolf. The wolf belongs to the syndicate boss Kalba who is no good from the very beginning. He knows all and sees all and he is very protective over his wolf. He makes Sena heal the wolf using scavver healing techniques and remedies.

Sena continues to get into trouble and pick pockets. She picks one pocket of a scientist and he ends up offering her a job to teach his team scavver techniques so they can survive the race to study the properties of the exocarbon. Sena just wants to get off world because she hates Tundar. She forms a close attachment to the wolf that Kalba named Iska which was Sena's mothers name. 

They join the race to get away from Kalba and then go from bad to worse. It was so anxiety inducing. I was stressed everytime something happened to Iska or she got thrown while battling a bear or the goblins. I did not want anything happening to this wolf.

I kept thinking of my baby Si the whole time because she is a German Shepherd and she looks so much like a wolf. We call her our little wolf. I also thought of my cat Missy's death because there was a part where Iska was close to death and it had all of the flutterinf of eyes and muscle spasms and I just remembered watching my cat die in front of me last year. 

The only thing that kept this from getting a 5 star was the constant reminders that the corpos were after the exocarbon. What the exocarbon is and all about the storms. How the corpos are changing the climate to make the exocarbon more accessible. I was annoyed by the middle of the book, but I am immediately jumping into the sequel because there is a new world and I am hoping that the same thing does not happen.