Rule of Wolves: A strong but rather slipshod conclusion to one of the best YA sagas in recent years

Reposting to include Rebecca’s new review.

Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo

Rule of Wolves, the second half of Leigh Bardugo’s NIKOLAI DUOLOGY, picks up right where King of Scars left off and flings the reader headlong into the story. In other words, if it’s been a while since you read King of Scars, you’d be well advised to refamiliarize yourself at least a little with its plot; if you haven’t yet read that book, don’t start with this one.

The Russia-inspired country of Ravka and its king, Nikolai Lantsov, are beset by threats from both without and within. To the north, the wintry country of Fjerda, which rejects the magical Grisha as evil, is making preparations to invade, and Fjerda has a substantial edge in war technology over Ravka. Nina Zenik is an undercover spy in Fjerda, now in a position of trust in the household of Fjerda’s chief military commander, Jarl Brum, but Nina’s growing attraction to Jarl’s daughter Hanne is a distraction and a danger to them both, with Hanne intended for a strategic marriage, perhaps even to Fjerda’s ailing prince. To the south, Queen Makhi of Shu Han has already tried to assassinate Nikolai, and her mutated khergud warriors have magical powers and unmatched strength.

Add to that:

• Nikolai’s possession by a bloodthirsty flying demon, which still sometimes takes over his body;
• the threat posed by the Darkling, who (as it developed in King of Scars) isn’t as dead and gone as everyone had assumed;
• a magical blight that appears randomly and destroys everything and everyone it touches;
• a competing contender for the throne of Ravka, a Lantsov relative whose followers assert that Nikolai isn’t the rightful ruler because the prior king isn’t his actual father; and
• Nikolai’s unspoken (and politically impossible) growing attraction to his beautiful and iron-willed Grisha general, Zoya.

All in all, Nikolai and Ravka … and the readers of this series … truly have their hands full. Bardugo juggles all of these plot lines fairly deftly, with each chapter jumping to a different viewpoint character and connections between the different plotlines becoming apparent as the story develops. The geographic scope of Bardugo’s Grisha universe has expanded greatly over the years, and in this seventh book she takes full advantage of her prior worldbuilding. The Grishaverse novels have become increasingly adult-oriented and intricately plotted with each book, and Rule of Wolves is the most epic in scale yet. It’s a complex story with many moving parts, not to mention a few crowd-pleasing cameos from characters from prior Grishaverse books.

The military threats to the north and south of Ravka drive most of the plot of Rule of Wolves, with warfare strategizing, spy adventures, and actual battles taking the forefront. However, romantic tension in the Nikolai-Zoya and Nina-Hanne relationships provide a bit of a break from the focus on war. Nina, who is still recovering from the loss of her Fjerdan lover Matthias, finds healing with Hanne and transitions to a bisexual (or perhaps a gay-for-you) character. At the same time, Hanne has a trans identity that she is gradually coming to terms with, against vast societal and family pressure, and Zoya has a secret mixed racial heritage that may upend her life plans.

The resolution of all of these romantic, personal identity, and military issues struck me as a bit too pat in the end, and the broad scope of the novel, like King of Scars, doesn’t completely gel into a cohesive whole. It’s still an absorbing, enjoyable story, though, and I recommend it to fans of Bardugo’s Grisha works.

The very ending of Rule of Wolves leaves the door wide open for future adventures in the Grisha world, but Bardugo, whose earlier books are the basis for the recent Shadow and Bone Netflix series, says that she’s saying goodbye to this world for now. She comments in an interview with the Orange County Register that “there are other universes and worlds I want to explore.” It will be fun to see where Bardugo’s imagination takes us next.

~Tadiana Jones

It’s been a very long hiatus between me reading King of Scars, the first book in this duology, and finishing Rule of Wolves, its conclusion – so to make up for it, this is going to be a very long (and spoiler-filled!) review.

Not only the second book in this two-parter, Rule of Wolves is also the end of the interconnecting set of stories that have taken place across seven books (one trilogy and two duologies) in what’s called the GRISHAVERSE, starting all the way back with Shadow and Bone (first published in 2012) and which also includes a number of short-story collections.

As such, Rule of Wolves carries the weight of being the wrap-up of this series in its entirety – or at least for the foreseeable future. Judging by its final line, Leigh Bardugo is keeping her options open, though she also seems eager to stretch her wings and write outside the limitations of the franchise that made her famous (having already published three more books since the publication of this one, none of which are part of the GRISHAVERSE).

So here goes…

My first impression is that this duology really should have been a trilogy. There is so much going on here, and three books would have not only made for nice symmetry with the original Shadow and Bone trilogy, but given this story more time to breath; more time to move between the various POV characters.

Instead, Rule of Wolves squeezes in the return of the Darkling, a series of military attacks from Fjerda, an attempt to flesh out the country of Shu Han, Prince Nikolai getting control of his inner demon, Zoya gaining mastery over her inner dragon, Nina’s undercover mission and burgeoning love affair with Hanne, and Mayu’s attempt to find her brother (that last one being a brand-new character that the reader has very little reason to be invested in).

There are secret weapons developed by the Shu and the Fjerdans, a blight that’s taking out vast swaths of Ravka, Nina finally identifying Matthias’s killer, the whereabouts of Nikolai’s biological father, cameos from Alina, Mal and the Crows… Bardugo even manages to squeeze in another heist.

Unsurprisingly, none of it really gets the depth that it deserves. It’s just too much stuff, meaning that things like David’s fate and Nikolai’s demon get lost in the shuffle, with no resolution or emotional heft whatsoever. The Fjerda invasion and the devastating blight don’t even seem to be happening in the chapters that don’t focus on them specifically, and Bardugo definitely breaks a few of her established world-building rules in order to get her characters where she wants them to go (Hanne tailors herself into a completely different person within the space of a few minutes, when it took Nina several hours, on an enhancing drug, to do the same to Wylan back in Six of Crows).

Likewise, the return of the Darkling – which was the big cliffhanger finish for King of Scars – ends up being a wet squib. He does nothing particularly interesting or important at all. And yes, I know this is the part where someone tells me that he stops the remnants of the Shadow Fold (or whatever the blight was meant to be) by sacrificing himself, but that only ignores the fact that this threat was also completely pointless, confined solely to the chapters in which it appears, and in hindsight, clearly introduced for no other purpose but to give the Darkling a sort-of redemption/punishment mash-up in the book’s final chapters.

Heck, no important character even seems to notice that great swaths of the world are being destroyed, let along consider it any kind of actual threat, during the course of the story. It happens a couple of times, and is then largely ignored until the time comes for the Darkling to destroy it while declaring that he doesn’t regret anything he did in life. His presence here seems to exist only as a chance for Bardugo to clarify who he is and how readers should feel about him, with speeches from Alina, Zoya and Genya (arguably the people he hurt most) that condemn him.

Leigh Bardugo

And hey, it’s not like I have any interest in defending the guy, but Bardugo’s readers have long-since made up their minds about how they feel about him. That’s not going to change due to some heavy-handed speechifying from our heroines.

Having said all this, you might be surprised to hear that I did like this book, simply because I enjoy spending time with these characters, in this particular world. Thanks to its hefty page-count, there was plenty of time to do so, and I can appreciate that Bardugo isn’t just writing a checklist of fandom’s favourite tropes. It’s not high literature, but compromises are made, people are killed, and endings are bittersweet.

I liked the glimpse into Shu Han’s matriarchal society (even if it’s difficult to care about Mayu, considering she’s only just been introduced) and our main cast of favourites all get some solid material. Nina’s espionage plot was probably my favourite, especially the element that intersected with Nikolai’s (his biological father bridges both subplots) and not even the incessant banter was that annoying this time around. The updates on what Alina, Mal and the Crows have been doing with their lives was fun too.

Still, as someone who’s always been interested in the political/religious landscape of these books, and who appreciated the way Bardugo ascribed various traditions and belief-systems to its peoples, I remain very confused about the Grisha and the worship of the Saints.

One of the interesting implications of this created world is that its Saints are actually exaggerated tales of real Grisha that existed in Ravka’s ancient past, whose exploits have been integrated into the country’s religious belief-system. And yet the lack of a monotheistic God has always been the elephant in the room when it comes to this set-up. I mean, saints are saints because they martyr themselves to their faith – but who exactly are these saints martyring themselves to? What cause? What deity? It’s always been a sticking point to me. Imagine the Catholic Church with all the Saints but not the God. Weird, right?

Perhaps the answer can be found with the Fjerdans, who are obviously an analogy to fundamentalist Christians, worshipping a singular deity called Djel. King of Scars introduced the strategy of trying to win over these people by staging fake miracles and ascribing them to Grisha (who are occasionally referred to as “living Saints”) which made for a fascinating concept: the clash between the Fjerdans’ faith and their religious prejudice against the Grisha. I loved the inherent irony in this set-up: that the intolerant fundamentalists were being drawn into the worship of flawed and ordinary people who were putting on a stage-show for them – but tragically, Rule of Wolves doesn’t do much with the continuation of the idea.

Granted, this is largely because Bardugo was focusing on other areas of plot and characterization, but I would have loved to have seen it explored more fully. When a late-in-the-game character says: “all stories come from somewhere, all gods are the same,” I wanted to know how exactly that matched up with the variety of belief-systems we’ve been exposed to across the last six books. In a series in which so many characters are moved or defined by their faith, it feels like there’s a huge chunk of it missing here.

And one last thing: surely this book should have been called Queen of Storms (or something to that effect) to match King of Scars, especially since Zoya ends up being the real protagonist of the piece. The “rule of wolves” seemingly refers to the Fjerdans, or is perhaps an allusion to “the hour of the wolf” from Swedish folklore, but neither explanation really matches the content of this book.

If this is the end of the GRISHAVERSE, then it went out on a high (enough) note. But if there’s more to come, then Bardugo has certainly left the door open for a return. I can wait.

~Rebecca Fisher