Dire Bound

The Wolves of Ruin #1

By Sable Sorensen

ISBN# 9780316601405

Author’s Website: https://sablesorensen.com/

Brought to you by OBS reviewer Heidi

*Beware of possible spoilers*

Meryn Cooper is a poor commoner, making what money she can in the fighting ring and working at the laundry.  Her mom suffers from mental illness so it’s up to Meryn to take care of her little sister, Saela.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my twenty-three years alive, it’s this: women in pain give men confidence. It stirs up something instinctive, deep inside of them, that makes them believe they have the upper hand, even if every logical piece of evidence screams at them they do not. 

Confidence makes men sloppy. 

And sloppy men are easy targets.”

Meryn has always hated the bonded, elite warriors that form mental links with large direwolves.  The bonded and their wolves fight in the war that has been raging for the last 500 years.  They protect the kingdom from the blood-sucking Siphons.

But when Saela gets kidnapped by the nabbers, Meryn will do anything to find her.  She must get to the front line of the war, as surely the Siphons have taken Saela across the border.  Unfortunately, Meryn does not have the money to get there so she does the only thing she can … she enlists in the army.  However, she was unaware that they’d be having bonding trials.  And, now she is forced to participate.  She just needs to survive.

And, then the unthinkable happens, the large most ancient of the direwolves forces a bond on her.  Now she’s stuck at the castle for the four-month training period.  

Will she survive?  And, if she does, will she be too late to save the sister she loves?

This book started out okay.  The world-building was interesting and the concept of the bonded was different.  It had a Hunger Games feel the way the other bonded were out for each other’s blood, especially with Meryn being a commoner.

However, I think the process of their training drug on way too long and it got boring.  I understand the need to detail the fight for survival that is the bonding trials, but I think it really could have been condensed.  

I figured out a lot of what happened at the end before it happened.  Who the big bad was, who Meryn is probably going to end up with, who her wolf’s mate was, etc., etc.

This may be a decent story to some; it honestly just wasn’t my kind of book.  I’m not a fight-for-survival and detailed battle kind of reader.  So, I would definitely take my opinions with a grain of salt.  This is probably not a series I would continue, it just didn’t hold my interest as much as I had hoped. 

On to the next, I suppose.