The Silver Wolf (Library Binding)

But once the establishing chapters end, the books winds up as a pretty fair piece of historical fantasy. The premise drew my attention to it in the first place: a female werewolf in eighth century Rome caught in the political struggle between the Pope, Charlemagne, and the Lombards. Borchardt writes the werewolf action and expeditions into the spirit world with flair, but often dwells on historical digressions for too long, losing the plot momentum. The story moves in fitful spurts of action and historical scene setting, and would have been a far better work at half the length.

The story is told mainly from Regeane's point of view, but the author has to slip into an omnipotent POV to show sketchy character development of the main male character. The male character is introduced early and quickly and does not show up again until the second half of the story. These switches are abrupt and force the reader out of the 'suspension of disbelief' needed for a fantasy story. The author also fails to define and bring to life an actual Villain except for the abusive uncle who, if the story were done correctly, would have been killed in the third chapter. There are several clumsy love scenes that seem to have been written by a teenager, including one out-of-place lesbian scene that is there apparently because lesbianism is chic right now. She also meets several secondary female characters that have sad life stories as well. And the reader is again clubbed over the head with the "women good, men bad" message.

Along the way Regeane communes with the dead, visits the afterlife, cures leprosy, has other people's past life flash-backs, meets her own kind, and lives happily ever-after. Alice Borchardt does not define a limited magical realm, a common failing among some fantasy writers to include all manner of the fantastic simply because they are enamored with everything. She should have stuck to mostly werewolf myth. She also stops the story flow to have main characters engage in private conversations. These conversations are used to "explain" things to the young Regeane, but only serve to lay out huge expository lumps. And finally she adds hooks into Arthurian characters that add nothing to the story, but are there to set up her next book. Pretty arrogant.