I will never outgrow stories that read like fairy tales, especially those with strong female characters. I selected this title because it was compared to Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, which I really loved. The Wolf and the Woodsman is darker, but a wonderful story and a very quick read. Thank you so much, NetGalley and Del Rey for the opportunity to read the eARC!

Well-written and developed fantasy filled to the brim with politics, religion, and romance. It's complex, multi-layered, and slow burn. Recommended for fans of Katherine Arden and Philip Pullman.

This book weaves stories within stories and a slow burn romance to die for. Something that surprised me about this book, was the gore. I love good body horror, and this book has it in settings that jar you from folkloric storytelling. It’s startling, at first, and nauseating. It makes this book have more depth than I originally expected it to.
Books that seem to focus primarily on the journey from one place to the other tend to drag on. At times, it felt like the book could have simply been shorter. However, these instances did make room for more of the slow burn romance. It’s a double-edged sword. I can’t wait to read more from Ava Reid.

My full review will be posted on May 17th, 2021

What better way to talk about the barriers of our cultural divide than by writing it all down in a fantasy novel with plot twist, intrigue, betrayal and love.

The Wolf and the Woodsman really does have it all. Evike, the main character is from a tainted bloodline according to those of her village. The village where her mother was born or pagan descent and her father a Yehuli man. This unusual relationship is to blame for Evike's lack of magical powers. Deemed useless by her people, when a group of Woodsmen, the King's men come for their pagan sacrifice to keep the King's power going, the village offers them up Evike as a gifted seer.

Betrayed by her village Evike sets out to her death with deceit clouding the mind's of the woodsmen until they are attacked by the monsters that rule the wood and another lie is uncovered. The captian of the woodsman, really the outcast Prince, who much like Evike is outcast because of his tainted blood, is the only one to survive the slaughter of the monsters with Evike. The two make a very unlikely pair and set out to work to together.

The Prince, Gaspar and Evike travel to Kingdom where ultimately Evike will be given to the king as his pagan sacrifice and Gaspar needs to figure out a way to stop his brother from taking over the kingdom and killing off the pagans and the Yehulis for being different from himself.

Evike discovers an unknown power after making a sacrifice and uses this power to thwart the king. In doing so she becomes property of the king and is at his disposal. In this new relationship and environment Evike once again tries to join up with Gaspar to stop his brother from killing off the Kingdom's people. Along the way, Evike meets her estranged father, learns more about the Yehuli ways and their magicks. With this knowledge and the ever changing relationship with Gaspar, Evike must make the ultimate choice as to who's side to be on and what actions she must take.

The Wolf and the Woodsman started off great, the imagery of the trees and the idea of these girls with magic being sacrificed made sense to me. I love the differences between worship. The worldbuilding was great, but around the middle of the book the story lost itself and didn't get itself back.

It went in an entirely different direction and just steam rolled out of control, the ending didn't match what we have learned of the characters and their devotion to each other. There was this battle scene towards the end which also came out of the woodwork and didn't match what we knew of the town that The Wolf came from, they were so eager to hand her over instead of someone else why would they suddenly want to fight for her and why would she agree to go back home with them when she is in love with the prince and they talk of marriage only for that not be a factor?

Once the brother was introduced along with her dad it just veered off course and didn't seem to know what it wanted.

"The Wolf and the Woodsman" follows Évike's treacherous journey with Gáspár, a Woodsman sent to capture her and bring her to the king she's never seen and in the process, we see their ideologies and ways of life clash with one another.

I really liked the first half of the story when it was just Évike & Gáspár but once they got to the city it got a bit dull. It's also a bit difficult to describe the book...dark fantasy/romance, I guess? It's not a typical book, to say the least.

The two major antagonists felt really flat and annoyed the heck out of me, the only thing missing from them was an evil mustache to twirl. I was also a bit uncomfortable with how the villagers constantly referred to Évike as "barren" for not having magic which just felt...weird.

Évike was a very entertaining protagonist, she's one you root for but you also want to yell at her for being ridiculous, ha.

Overall, a decent read, but it's not going to be for everyone. As many have said, it's similar to Naomi Novik's "Uprooted" and I also include the recent release "Serpent & Dove" by Shelby Mahuri as a similar read. Basically, dark fantasy, dark romance, dark everything! Not that it's bad, but if you're looking for a Hallmark romance, this ain't it.

It's a little slow-paced, but never boring. It just has a really good buildup to the climax of the book. There is a lot of character development in that time with the main characters. This book takes place over a relatively short amount of time, but it is packed with character development, great worldbuilding, and an interesting magic system based on physical sacrifice.

Évike is a character who has a lot of personal inner struggles, and her path to self-acceptance was very believable. She learns about the other side of her heritage and their stories, and the stories of the people she was raised to hate and fear, and she starts to see that things aren't as simple as she first assumed.

Gáspár is another well-rounded character. He goes through a similar path of character growth involving self-acceptance. His is just as personal, but the other side of it. Him coming to terms with his father and brother and even the religion he devoted his life to aren't as fallible as he once believed. That their way is hypocritical at best, and fundamentally flawed at worst. And he too had to realize that things aren't as black and white.

The magic system, in a word, gruesome. The Pagan women are born with magic that often comes with some kind of physical mutation and the magic of the Woodsmen involves the physical sacrifice of mutilation. The magic of the Yehuli wasn't as clear to me. And all the magic that can be performed by each group is different, I am unsure how to explain it. It might lean a little into spoilers.

There is a bit of romance, in this book. It's very much a background plotline, and while it does affect character motivations, it doesn't overrule anything else in this book. I felt that this was a much better balance with the other more pressing plotlines than a lot of other fantasy books that have a romance.

I really loved this tale. I described it to a friend as The Witcher meets Serpent and Dove meets Uprooted. There's been a lot of similar trending stories lately, but this one is unique enough to stand on its own.

Really enjoyed it, especially its investigation of nation building and all the methodical bloody planning and tools that go into it— genocide, cultural death, racism. Very human characters and interpersonal dynamics, and tension, but it feels unfinished towards the end. How does the kingdom deal with Nandor’s followers and worst enablers? Do we learn more? That’s messy, and I want to see it. I’d both recommend and buy for my library. Loved the romance, obviously!

Expectations were high for a book compared to Spinning Silver, and those high expectations were very much not met. This felt like more of a YA romance than an adult fantasy, and as YA romance is very much not my genre, I didn't feel compelled enough to finish and see whether the writing and characters matured later on in the book.

I wanted to like this, and I am interested in flawed and angry narrators. The lore was cool and the dark, borderline horror setting was lovingly laid out. But the MC was *so* prickly, being in her head was a drag. And here saying "ooooooh bet you wanna f*ck me so bad" to her LI every five pages was pathetic rather than fun. I guess I should have paid closer attention to the comps, as I was lukewarm on Uprooted and Spinning Silver. DNF @65%. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

This book was so freaking good! Seriously, everyone should read this. If you were a fan of Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver or Katherine Arden's "The Bear and the Nightingale" then this is a must-read!
The story is about a woman named Évike. She has been raised in a village of women who have the power to heal, forge, or see the future. They are known as wolf girls. Even though Évike was born from a woman with a gift, Évike has none and is considered an outcast and bad luck. So when the Woodsmen come for a "wolf girl" to bring to their king, her village betrays her and gives Évike up instead.
Her journey to the city is tragic and all except herself and the handsome one eyed woodsman survive the journey. This turn of events has them depending on one another more and more and their feelings for each other are becoming harder to hide.
Her journey to the city of the king and a hope to find her Jewish father are filled with mythological stories that are beautifully told. I absolutely loved this book. This may be my favorite book of the year so far. :)

I really enjoyed this story! I saw several posts on my twitter timeline lauding it, so I jumped in and requested a copy. I'm glad I did!

There are a couple of really small things that bumped my rating down to a 4, but I'll get into that in a second.

First, I love the enemies-to-lovers trope. LOVE IT! And <i>The Wolf and the Woodsman</i> is all about the EtL. Emphasis on the 'enemies', and not a lot on the 'lovers' side, but it was plenty. It's also awesome to get a hero that doesn't fit into any one category. He's alpha but also not. He's sensitive, but also gruff and grumbly. Noble while having some blemishes in his character. Fully-formed and well-rounded.

And our heroine is the star of the story. She is everything you'd want her to be. I connected to her character right off the bat. Not because I have anything in common with her, but because you see who she is from the start.

The side characters are also great. None of them are black and white, just like the hero and heroine. It makes them seem real.

Now here's my very small nits. I don't mind correlaries to real-world things at all, but I prefer much subtler approaches. This absolutely did not ruin the story for me though. I just like to draw the similarities myself, as a slow dawning of the connections. While it's not a direct hit to the head, it's definitely very obvious.

And while I enjoyed the ending, it's not picture-perfect. I completely understand why it's the way it is, but I kinda wanted something a little different. That is 100% on me.

I highly recommend <i>The Wolf and the Woodsman</i>. Especially if you like fantasy, complex characters, and connections to mythology.

I give it four 'awesome bear' stars.

Two people missing pieces of themselves try to find their place in a world that both values and mistrusts magic.

Evike and Gaspar are both misfit outcasts from their own tribes, thrown together to struggle against a fanatical despot who believes himself divine and wants them both dead. Combining mythology and history, Reid creates a multifaceted world for our antiheroes to navigate.

While sacrifice and grief are major themes throughout the book, it is never overwhelming or without hope.

Trigger warnings: bullying, loss of parent

Ava Reid's debut is a fascinating epic told through the lens of Hungarian and Jewish mythology and folklore. Évike, a pagan wolf-girl blighted by her father's Yehuli blood, is the only girl without magic in her village. When the Patrician woodsmen come to collect the village's seer for the king, Évike is swapped out. After gruesome tragedy strikes on the trail, Évike discovers her woodsman captor, Gáspár, is in fact the nation's half-blooded prince and together the two strike an uneasy alliance and set off on a quest to kill the turul--a bird that will give whoever consumes it the power of sight, thereby saving Évike and strengthening Gáspár's claim to the throne.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. The first half of the book is mostly two people falling in love while arguing around their deeply held beliefs and status in society. Gáspár is an unwanted prince trying to prevent his usurper brother's rise to power, and Évike is a loathed, magicless wolf-girl trying to find her place in the world. The two don't get along, but the quest forces them to work together through a chapter-by-chapter crisis until they find themselves in the middle of court without the turul and plenty of knives at their throats.

The Wolf and the Woodsman is a bit chaotic, but deeply immersive. The magic woven through religion was well done, as was the critique of religious nationalism. I only wish it had either been shorter or expanded into a duology to allow time to really settle into the world.

THE WOLF AND THE WOODSMAN is an enemies-to-lovers tale filled with bickering and tender moments of wound-care. It luxuriates in tense conversation, short back-and-forth dialogues punctuated by stony silence and snow. The MC’s narrative ruminations on her traveling companion deftly show what she thinks of him while leaving room for something more in his body language that an interested reader might puzzle out. They fill the silence in a way that ensures the reader is never left alone, even while the MC is trapped in her head, relentlessly pondering the meaning of every word, silence, and gesture from the Woodsman. They are drawn together by a strangely aligned goals that have, at minimum, a destination in common for both of them. Once at this destination, the narrative opens somewhat while still keeping focus on the weight of words and the way they can twist in an instant from toying to cruel, from mild interest to genuine warmth. Its slowly widening scope introduces the political tightrope the MC must traverse. Here it becomes apparent that amid all that travel, banter, and attempts to not fall in love was a lot of very important information about the power structure and current state of the kingdom and its leader. I really like political structures in fantasy, and therefore was very interested in this one, but it isn’t a politically dense book. It conveyed really well essential social information in a seemingly inconsequential manner before the MC arrived in locations where she needed to use that knowledge, and I appreciate how well it was worked in.

One of the strengths of this as an enemies-to-lovers story was that the MC and the eventual love interest had pretty good reasons to dislike each other as kinds of people, but not to already hate each other specifically, which made the transformation from ire to romance feel believable but not rushed. A lot of really excellent emotional groundwork and world-building was laid in the first half of the book, which meant that the second half could carefully subvert some (but not all) of those expectations and play with their implications in some really great ways. I feel a little as though that’s just how good books work, but the first and second half feel so distinct to me. Each had their own unique flavor which made the whole book sing. The world building is really good. I like the way that there were canonically several paths to magic, all of which are different in their particulars but involve some combination of access, mastery, and sacrifice. The MC begins the book thinking that she is unable to use the path that everyone has been expecting her to have. she finds her way into the path that’s good for her; not wholly new ground, something recognizable to those around her even if her specific blend is a bit strange.

CW for ableism (minor), bullying, kidnapping, homophobia (minor), racism, antisemitism, religious bigotry, blood, gore, vomit, sexual content, physical abuse, domestic abuse (backstory), emotional abuse, self harm, murder, torture, cannibalism (not depicted), animal death, parental death, child death, death (graphic).

The Wolf and the Woodsman is a dark YA fantasy adventure that explores cultural and religious differences in made-up countries reflective of the real world, as noted in the synopsis that it's inspired by Hungarian and Jewish myths.

At times the monsters felt like loose ends never tied up, but the setting and cultures are vibrant. The author did a particularly great job writing the main characters' journey; she described the changing lands and distance well enough that I noticed and didn't wish for a map like I frequently do in other fantasies.

This is a great example of a successful enemies-to-lovers romance. The characters must fight through deeply rooted prejudices and fears in order to embrace the mutual attraction, as well as wade through political and magical drama.

The book includes a pronunciation guide which was helpful, especially at first. I also appreciated the author's note. It was cool to learn that the author has studied world religions! It's neat that she translated that into a fun YA novel.

Thank you NetGalley and Harper Voyager for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!

I read the first 50 pages and decided that this book is not for me. It is very, very similar to Novik’s Uprooted. I wasn’t interested in any of the themes and tropes, the characters seemed quite flat to me, the dialogue was very cliched, and the plot, which seemed to be developing quickly with some good action early on, nevertheless completely failed to grasp my interest. I also found the idea of the MC’s lack of inherited or bloodright powers resulting in her being referred to as “barren” EXTREMELY problematic. It’s going to be a DNF for me.

I wanted to love this book but ended up only liking it. Reid's writing is beautiful and I loved the world she created. However I was left feeling wanting on the plot. The first half of the book or so our two main characters are searching for a magical bird only to reach their destination and abruptly give up the search and turn right back around to head back to the city. While the bird plot does come back into play later, at the beginning it felt anti-climatical and like the story could have been worked around that better. I was also interested in our two main characters and their relationship in the beginning (I'm a sucker for enemies to lovers!) as the story went on I became increasingly annoyed with the main girl as she continually lashes out and it felt that for most of the book there wasn't much growth or change from that behavior and it did get old. I also wish we could have had duel perspective and have seen some of the book from the main guys POV. Generally it felt like the book might have worked better if it had either been edited down some, or split into two books so the author could really delve into the characters more.
Overall, I liked it but it wasn't really for me, but I feel like there are people who would love this book!

The Wolf and the Woodsman does feel very similar to Naomi Novik's Uprooted, which is a blessing and a curse. Reid definitely has her own style, but it was hard to shake this book from other similar stories. I loved the world-building here, though! I could easily read a series that takes place in this world, because a lot seems to happen in a short amount of time. Still, I understand how this would be a great recommendation for Naomi Novik and Katherine Arden fans.