We meet her family, fellow POWs at the camp, and those that would train her to become an assassin, to her fellow racers.
In a series of very effective flashbacks throughout the novel, we meet in turn each of the loves and losses of Yael’s young life. Wolf By Wolf is a fierce furious battle cry of a book, with all the hardships, triumphs, loves and losses that come with it. However this doesn’t detract from the care and detail that goes into the setting, storytelling, and character building. Add to this the antiseptic smell of human monstrosity jarred with the too close bodies that make up Yael’s childhood memories and Wolf By Wolf will steal your breath with each brilliant new scene. Then there’s the rattle of your teeth and full body vibrations on a motorbikes seat, struggling onwards as desert storms whipping at your face. She throws you into the scene with a gamut of surround sound and sensation, opening with the racket of the train’s engines shrinking an already claustrophobic space into a nightmare of noise. Graudin is the Queen of immediate, powerful filmic writing. If she can win this, she’ll be able to get close enough to kill the Fuhrer and change history forever. Using her abilities, she must transform into Adele Wolfe, Germany’s most famous female rider and winner of the legendary Axis Tour an epic long distance motorcycle race from Berlin to Tokyo, where only the strongest (and wiliest) riders survive. The only part of her which always remains the same is the five tattooed wolves on her arm one for each of the people she’s lost. Having survived experimentation during her incarceration at a concentration camp, Yael has the unique ability to change her appearance at will. It was the only thing about her that ever stayed the same. Wolves howled up her arm… A whole pack of them-made of tattoo ink and pain, memory and loss. Once upon a different time, there was a girl who lived in a kingdom of death. Graudin’s writing twists the outcome of historical events to create a devastating ‘what if?’ as Yael claws her way into the lead with one mission to kill Hitler. In Germania, 1956, ten years after the Nazis won the war she fights tooth and nail for survival against the most horrendous odds in a selfless, tireless bid to put a stop to tyranny. She has stormed her way to the front of the pack to become one of my favourite protagonists of all time.
Meet 18-year-old Yael Jew, child prisoner of war, experiment, escapee, young woman, shapeshifter, spy.
This incredible alternate World War II history is a heart-stopping, world changing, truly unmissable second novel from The Walled City author, Ryan Graudin. How do you confront human monstrosity? Could you look your enemy in the eye? Wolf By Wolf is a howling, powerful must read for 2015.
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