Wind Follower, by Carole McDonnell, could be reduced down to the simple tale of “man falls in love with woman, man loses woman, man gets woman back” story, but that would lose a lot of depth of this story. The writing style of this novel is gritty and brutal which adds a lot to the tribal interactions of characters. The main characters are fascinating and damaged–something I enjoy greatly. However, all of the characters, primary and secondary, suffer with rapid changes of emotions throughout the story, which made it difficult to follow the complexity of the inter- and intra-tribal relationships.
I loved the world-building except for the foreign words interspersed throughout the book. They took me a while to translate into analogs of my own experience which pulled me out of the story.
The first half of the book is my favorite, for the world and character building, the interactions and even the religion. The final quarter I did not enjoy as much. I felt it ended too quickly without a satisfying ending. The rapid changes in emotional state turns into sudden changes in abilities, comprehension, and plot revelations. The emotional rapport that the author gives to the readers snaps with this ending and what could have been an enjoyable ending came out as a sputtering stop. I wasn’t aware of the author before reading this and I felt that the ending was inspired too much from Christian tales, in specific the stories of Jesus and Moses, with just a few of the names changed as appropriate. Even with those influences, I’d rather see the ending built up a bit more and less copied from already established stories.
One could say something about judging the book by its over, but I absolutely loved the cover on this one. Would I read it again? Maybe once or twice more, but I’m likely to set it down two-thirds into the story simply because of the ending.