I recently read The Wolf and the Rain by Tanya Lee. It is a book about a dystopian world set in the future. Although it was not my favorite book that I’ve read (even this month) it was fairly enjoyable. I received an advanced reader copy of this book free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
The Wolf and the Rain follows the story of Samarra, who also goes by Sam. She has a fairly good (although perhaps shady) job, in a place where good employment is scarce. The world is a fairly dangerous place, where most people don’t know how to read, and knowledge of things like basic sanitation is limited.
The story switches back and forth between the North (where Sam works at this shady job) and the South, where there is a completely different storyline going on. We know that Sam is from the South, and so it’s fairly simple to deduce that the storyline in the South is probably about her, but the whole switching back and forth between the two timelines can be hard to follow, at first.
In the South, life is completely different. They know about basic sanitation. People have work. Yet everything seems so… regimented. It almost feels as if the people in the South have no freedom or identity. This is a huge contrast to the North, where chaos reigns, but people have choices to go to parties and aren’t told what to do for most of the day.
From the beginning of the story, Sam seems obsessed with the disappearance of a girl that she’s never met (in the Northern storyline, at least). She spends her free time trying to track down the girl, even though it puts her into danger. For much of the story, I was wondering “why does she care so much?” This remains a mystery for most of the book.
While this is a dystopian book, there is also a puzzle to it. You’re left trying to piece together why Sam is so interested in the missing girl, what happened to the girl, and how do the timelines from the North and the South intersect? Sadly, you won’t get the answers to ANY of these questions as you read this book. Although the puzzle starts to come together, it doesn’t completely form into a whole picture by the end. There is supposed to be a sequel, and I guess the answers lie there.
The book started off slow. The multiple timelines were confusing at first, and at first, I didn’t really care about the outcome all that much. Towards the end of the book, after I got to know the characters and I started to figure out what was going on, it got interesting and I wanted to find out more.
I do plan on reading the sequel to The Wolf and the Rain at some point. While this isn’t one of my favorite books, it was interesting and I thought it was worth reading.