This novel is a retelling of the old Russian story of Prince Ivan and the Gray Wolf. Many of these old folk tales are bizarre and brutal, but this one takes some beating. It's a story of stupidity and cruelty, and of theft and kidnapping, and you'd seriously have to put in some work to render it into an interesting story for modern ears - unless you just wanted to piss-off people. It doesnlt help that the story has too modern of s sensibility. I read at one point for example: "Don’t forget that it’s in the main square today." To me, that didnt seem like it fit the antique sensibility the author was trying to extstablish here, and it took me out of suspension of disbelief.
This author in my opinion has failed to make the story interesting and worse, has failed to make the characters interesting either. I started out interested, but became bored to tears rather quickly, and despite plugging on for a while in the hope that it would improve, I gave up about third of the way through because literally nothing was happening except that the 'prince' character, here named Voran, was showing us quite often how stupid and lethargic he was. And just in passing, Voron has a sister named Lebía. His sister has a name that's reminiscent of labia? Really?
He ends up meeting a pilgrim (here that's like a sorcerer-cum-prophet) who specifically tells him that to save the city he must find the living water, but rather than ask about this water: where it is, how to find it, and rather than ask the pilgrim to magically transport him there (a trick the pilgrim has shown himself quite capable of performing), Voran lolls around doing nothing. Later, he takes off on a trip with a bunch of people going on a pilgrimage, and then he abandons them for no good reason despite having been haunted all his life by his father's having abandoned some people in the past in similar circumstances - a dereliction of duty for which he's despised as a traitor. In short, Voron should really be named Moron.
Voran knows that this entire society will come crashing down if he doesn't find this living water. He can see signs that society is dying, yet at no point does he show any interest whatsoever in getting started on his quest. He's a dick. The problem is that instead of telling this really short story of the wolf in one volume, this author has gone the mercenary way of trying to turn it into a trilogy or a series, and it has suffered for it by dragging tediously along when a reader like me wants to see something happen, so the hell with it. I'm done with this story and with this author.
