Book dossier

The Red Snow

by James Greiner

***In The Red Snow, his second work, Greiner turns his keen eye to Alaska's vast wilderness and its most mysterious creature: the gray wolf.*** Basing his story on careful research and personal observation, **Greiner recounts the lives of the Tanana River Valley wolf pack and the tough, lonely hunter, Jake, who inhabits their valley.** In splendid detail, he describes the birth of pups, the victory of the hunt, and the habits of animals who share the wolves' valley. Yet ***in describing the beauty, he never forgets the harshness of the Arctic wilderness; Greiner makes the ugly realities of the fight for survival intensely clear.*** ***Feb 09, 2018 Goodreads member: Cienna Lyon liked it 3 of 5 stars.*** This book shows its age, but that doesn't mean it's bad. The book was written in the 1980's, but I assume it is set in an earlier time due to certain aspects of the story. ***The natural aspect of this is absolutely amazing.*** The entire book has no dialogue, and is simply a day by day descriptions of a wolf pack's life as well as the animals that interact with them. If you don't enjoy animal behavior or detailed descriptions of nature it probably isn't for you, as the prose can be lengthy and sometimes over detailed or boring. ***The only aspect I genuinely didn't like was the human interaction with the wolf.*** I think we're meant to care about Tatum, a trapper living in Alaskan wilderness and this is where the age of the book really shows. **SPOILERS: The trapper seeks revenge against the wolf pack because he hates wolves, they chewed up his snowmobile seat and very late in the book one of the wolves kills his dog (something they would very rarely do in reality).** So in retaliation he traps 3 of them in snares and foot traps, which is horrid and many other animals fall prey to this and later he decimates all but two of the wolves by airplane. Honestly this was so hard to read and I don't understand why a good book was ruined by this addition. My only complaint, but it makes me like the book a lot less.