Wolves of Ruin: Direbound by Sable Sorensen - First Book *Huge Spoilers*

 

So, I finished listening to Dire Bound by Sable Sorensen. The opening music really picked up my interest and wasn't jarring.  The beginning starts out with action that immediately catches your attention and shows you a good chunk of the Main Female character's personality, and you also get to see some of what shapes her.

I know I'm doing this out of order, but I'm more interested in the development of Meryn than talking about the story's progression from point A to point Z.  So let me start there.

About halfway through listening, I got curious about the book and did a Google search, and picked a random site that talks about it - turns out it was a Reddit site with a lot of negativity.  A lot of the comments were about the character Meryn, though I did notice one comment mentioned a podcast the author guested on, which mentions she's an unreliable narrator, so I picked up my ears and listened more carefully.

So, let me review for my own take on it.  Meryn's family doesn't have any clue as to their family history (well, she and her sister, Saela don't, I'm not sure how much her mother really knows; though if it's been many centuries since there has been Queens of Nocturne, so I'm guessing any information would be in the form of stories passed down along with the family's 'treasures.'  We also don't know what their father might or might not have known before he died at the front line.  We also do not know the type of person he really was because we see him through Meryn's eyes, and what information her parents tell her and her sister, as well as what she picks up by observation.

We also know that she had to leave school at a certain age, though she must have stayed long enough to learn to read and write, because her father died at the front line in a war against the Siphons, though apparently only a finger was all they could find of him, so the grave is more of a memorial without an actual body.  This makes me wonder if maybe he was turned into a Siphon and not actually killed.  She has a mother who suffers from a mental illness (though her hallucinations later on appear to have some substance to it in reference to their bloodline's history) that we later discover is linked to not being bound to a Dire Wolf, which makes me think it is a magically induced condition.  How this condition came about, I'm really curious to learn.  In one of the smaller twists, before her father left for the front line, he and his wife managed to procreate another baby, Meryn's sister Saela, and because her Mother is not always of sound mind, Meryn is forced to be the one to earn a living so they have a place to live.  She's listed as exempt from being conscripted due to a caregiver dispensation, which makes me wonder just how much her parents knew about her mother's family history.  Did her father know more than the fact that his Wife's bloodline was prone to eventual madness or is it possible he (and his wife) were in possession of more information than that and were waiting for their children to reach a certain age before telling them?  Only, he dies way before then (as of the information we have in this first volume) and Meryn's mother's condition worsens so she can't tell them anything coherently.  

So Meryn's father dies, and she's grieving as any child who loses a parent would, only she's prone to enacting that by fighting.  She's still young enough to need parental guidance and doesn't really have that at home anymore.  Igor, a neighbor, sees that she has a talent for winning her fights and is just a little lost, so he trains her to focus her energy into something that expends it but also helps her to earn money for her family while earning himself money as well.  His wife (as shown in the bonus) doesn't seem to really like Meryn or the fact that her husband Igor, seems to have adopted her in a way.  I'd almost have to guess she's jealous on some level of child Meryn, and remains jealous of a grown-up Meryn, though I'm not sure if that's morphed into a different kind of jealousy.  Needless to say, I'm pretty sure such an attitude didn't make Meryn feel welcome and more of an outsider.  Relatively few truly accept her outside of her Sister and Igor (and her Mother when she's lucid), of course, because of the poverty they live in also teaches her very little trust outside of that.  Especially when strange men always try to take advantage of her, and I'm sure she hears negative whispers about her mother, which adds to her distrust.  Saela seems to have it a little easier because Meryn's superprotective of her, but she also feels the Upper class doesn't care for what's happening in her neighborhood to the children and the nabbers grabbing them straight out of their houses, whilst sending people off to die at the front lines fighting the Siphons there.  So she also sees herself as doing her best to make sure the children can at least somewhat protect themselves, since no one else is teaching them that.  This has to make her suspicious of the world in general and makes it hard for her to trust in general.  Then her sister is taken and even though she's her mother's primary caregiver, finding her sister is more important.  She's helped to raise her since she was an infant and has no one to go after her, but she has neighbors who have helped in the pass to keep an eye on her mother when she's not at the house because she's out earning money via her fights.  Also by this time, there's Lee, a royal messenger (Killian in disguise) who seems very nurturing toward Meryn and promises to look after her mother while she's gone.  Of course she enlists before telling him what she's doing, which is rather impulsive, but she's an inexperienced adult who is in distress because her sister is missing and she 'needs' to do something to find her.  Her guess is that the Siphons have stolen her away toward Aurelia somewhere, so what better way to get there than to join the military?  She now has Lee, whom she can rely on to help watch her mother.

So she joins with that firm goal in mind, not realizing that her family bloodline is from an ancient queendom who bond with Dire Wolves, she isn't expecting to bond and thinks such a thing will slow her down in search for Saela.  I'll make an aside mention here of Stark, who did not leave a great first impression of himself with her to begin with.  He knows who she is, but resents that his family's bloodline is sworn to her family's bloodline's guardianship; doesn't even make an effort to be helpful.  He's older than she is, and he's aware of a good portion of how she grew up, knows she's most likely not going to trust strangers easily, and yet doesn't try to make the first overture.  She hasn't had a lot of opportunities to learn how to trust or to be a friend, and no real examples.  She's also hyper-focused on rescuing her sister.  Then she learns, too late, that her batch of enlisted are being sent to try and bond with Dire Wolves.  She does meet some people she feels she can tentatively trust for now, but she's still on board with what's going on.  She firmly states she does not want to bond (as it will interfere with her goal of ultimately rescuing her sister).  She survives the mountain, and Anassa comes along and insistently bonds with Meryn, though Meryn has firmly thought at and said she does not want to bond.  Anassa forces the bond on her, and then she wonders at Meryn's attitude toward her.  Anassa's kind of a bit of a mystery herself and how a Dire Wolf thinks isn't the same way as a human so her reactive attitude is also somewhat understandable, but she in return does not accord her rawbond the same courtesy.  No, instead she walls out Meryn and makes her walk all the way back to the Bonded City, though she knows Meryn cannot enter without her.  Keep in mind, to Meryn's way of thinking she's now hindered in her rescue of her sister.  Then she's subjected to a violent and unforgiving culture of the Dire Wolf and their bonded without any real help in understanding it.  Remember, it's the twins who reach out to her and it takes her a while to learn to trust them due to her own upbringing.  She eventually does get there, as they're her first real friends.  There's more that happens that makes her trust issue take hits but she eventually works through that to an extent.  Especially after learning Lee is really Prince Killian and then much later is betrayed by him when he encourages her to kill his father.  At which point she learns they are usurpers and Siphons, the ones who actually had the kids kidnapped to feed them.

So yes, I'd say she's an unreliable narrator (as any 1st Person Story can be) because she is shaped by her environment and experiences.  None of which makes her a soft personality to begin with.  In many ways, this book is a slow burn aside from the romance.  She's learning a new way of living.  It will be interesting to see how things develop in the next novel.