The Wolf’s Curse

As this story begins, a world-weary wolf, the book's narrator, warns readers to “walk away now. Life is hard enough without adding death to the mix.” Ignoring her advice, readers will soon discover that this is the Great White Wolf who has spent many hundreds of years bringing the souls of the departed to the Mother Wolf. But she is so desperately tired and longs to be free to make her own journey to the Woods Beyond. To do so, however, she needs to find someone to agree to take her place. And she is certain that she has found just the person to do this.

Gauge is Bastien the Carpenter's grandson. He was once a boy who laughed and played with the other children of Bouge-by-the-Sea but now, at age 12, he is an outcast who lives hidden in the back of his grandfather's shop. The people of their village feared and reviled him because five years earlier, on the very day that Mayor Vulpine's beloved wife met her untimely death, Gauge saw the White Wolf. The strange ability to see this creature, this omen of death that no one else could see, marked him as a Voyant and, in this village, Voyants are feared and hated and set out to sea to die. Gauge's grandfather who loved him so deeply bribed the guard who came for him with everything he had, and that is the only reason that Gauge survived. Now he lives in secret, helping his grandpapa and honing his own skills as a carpenter. But now it is Gauge's beloved grandpapa's turn to leave this world and set sail for the Sea-in-the-Sky, leaving Gauge truly alone, with his last words firmly planted in the grieving boy's head and his heart: “Stay away from the wolf.”

With Bastien's passing, it doesn't take long for the villagers to discover that Gauge is still in their midst, and he must seek refuge. To his tremendous surprise, the blacksmith and his daughter Roux take him in and offer him shelter and safety and help. But the blacksmith, himself, is very sick, and it is not long before he, too, passes from this world. In the midst of her own grief, Roux still insists on helping Gauge, even when he decides that he must seek out and slay the White Wolf. With the entire village trying to find Gauge so that they can set him out to sea once and for all, Gauge and Roux embark on this new quest. But the things that they learn along the way – about their neighbours, their most sacred beliefs and the traditions that they have held dear all of their lives, and about the White Wolf herself – change absolutely everything; for Gauge and Roux, for the Mayor and the people of Bouge-by-the-Sea, and even for a tired wolf that only a chosen few can see.

In this thoughtful and engaging debut, Jessica Vitalis explores the themes of grief and loss alongside the concept of death, the painful realities of dying, and the industry and societal norms surrounding all of these things. Yet for a book that is entirely focused on death, there is a surprising amount of levity and ultimately hopefulness in its pages. The choice of the wolf as narrator is especially effective in keeping the tone light, particularly with the frequent footnotes and flippant asides that she directs at the reader. Both Gauge and Roux emerge as highly sympathetic characters, and the friendship they develop is tender and heartwarming. The author very sensitively relates each of their encounters with death and losing the person they love most in the world. Their overwhelming sense of suffering and loss is very genuinely depicted and beautifully-described, and Vitalis perceptively captures the full range of emotions that they each experience as they try to navigate their pain. Gauge's frustration – with the White Wolf who seems to have been the source of all his troubles; with the villagers when he realizes that they have all known the truth about their sacred end-of-life traditions all along; with himself – is realistic and relatable.

While the plot is very much centered on the emotional journeys of these two children, it, nonetheless, unfolds deliberately but with enough urgency and dramatic tension to keep readers fully engaged. Gauge carefully pieces together his observations about the rituals surrounding death and dying, but he is shocked when he discovers that the conclusions he reaches are not in fact the truth that he was seeking. The story's resolution is surprising and thoroughly satisfying in a variety of ways. When the Mayor, himself, is forced to confront the full extent of his own grief, guilt and loss, the author further demonstrates the fact that people each grieve in their own ways, that grief can be a long and meandering journey, and that it is not only children who struggle to understand and make peace with profound sorrow. And the Wolf's own story as it is gradually revealed adds another intriguing element to this tale.

The Wolf’s Curse, a very literary and elegantly-written exploration of complex themes, is a thought-provoking and introspective tale that offers much to reflect on and is a compelling story of family, friendship, love and life lessons.