Quill & Quire
It might be a tad cynical, but it’s all the same difficult to shake the impression that
Wolf Pack of the Winisk River, the first book from Belleville, Ontario, author Paul Brown, was written to satisfy a market segment. Normally, this would not be the case for a book-length narrative poem – which, sad but true, typically has
no market segment whatsoever – but Brown’s book, which chronicles the journey of a wolf pack along the Winisk River to Hudson Bay, seems tailor-made for that most crucial of YA markets: the public-school curriculum. This is perhaps not entirely surprising. Brown is a retired schoolteacher, and he’s delivered a book that might be useful in English or language-arts classes, or as support material for science, nature, or ecology programs. It wouldn’t be an issue at all if only
Wolf Pack of the Winisk River were a stronger book in its own right. At a narrative level, the book functions well enough. The pack’s epic journey north is marked by hunts, periods of hunger, painful losses, and emotional reunions. It’s an occasionally exciting story, the sort of “nature lite” that will be familiar to those old enough to recall episodes of
Hinterland Who’s Who. Brown stops short of anthropomorphizing his wild characters, but he comes close, given the emotional content and the breathless nature of the narrative voice. As a poem, though,
Winisk River doesn’t impress. Free verse isn’t a licence for lazy metaphors and clichés, a fact that is perhaps more important when writing for younger readers. “They tough it out// they spit in the face of winter” is, sadly, typical of much of the writing, and makes Brown’s novel difficult to recommend, regardless of how appropriate it might seem for course adoption.
Product Description
(ages 10 and up) Powerful free verse captures the raw beauty of the landscape and wildlife of northern Ontario.
Food is scarce after a harsh winter and in order to stay alive, a large timber wolf must fight off two young male wolves and insert himself into a pack led by a strong alpha female. Together they lead the pack's two-hundred-mile journey along the Winisk River to Hudson Bay and the Severn River, pursuing the Woodland Caribou. As their struggle for survival intensifies, the wolves are threatened by human hunters, near-starvation, treacherous waters, and attacks by competing packs. In this bold literary work, Paul Brown explores the Great North and the heart of its wildlife through the eyes of a determined, courageous timber wolf.
