Author: Anne Bishop
Book Name: Wild Country
Series: The World of the Others
Order: #2
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: Excellent/Favorite
Blurb: There are ghost towns in the world—places where the humans were annihilated in retaliation for the slaughter of the shape-shifting Others.
One of those places is Bennett, a town at the northern end of the Elder Hills—a town surrounded by the wild country. Now efforts are being made to resettle Bennett as a community where humans and Others live and work together. A young female police officer has been hired as the deputy to a Wolfgard sheriff. A deadly type of Other wants to run a human-style saloon. And a couple with four foster children—one of whom is a blood prophet—hope to find acceptance.
But as they reopen the stores and the professional offices and start to make lives for themselves, the town of Bennett attracts the attention of other humans looking for profit. And the arrival of the outlaw Blackstone Clan will either unite Others and humans…or bury them all.
This! This, this, this, THIS!! This is more along the lines of what I expected from Lake Silence. Where Lake Silence is set in this world, it is almost entirely a stand alone book. Outside of the need to be familiar with the world, there is almost nothing that ties that into the original The Others series and can be almost be read by itself. While that is still an excellent book, it didn’t have any familiar characters or settings. This book, however, absolutely does!
Many of the main characters are ones readers got to meet in the original series and it is set in Bennet, a place readers are familiar with because of events in the original series. No, it does not have Meg and Simon, other than mentions (always going to be a tiny bit of a disappointment because they are some of my all time favorite characters).
The timing of this book runs a little in step with Etched in Bone. It actually runs along Lake Silence as well, but because that one is so disconnected from all the other books, it is irrelevant. I would almost call this book #6 in the original series, but because of the lack of Meg and Simon, it does mostly fall outside of that series.
I love the fact that you get to follow many of the characters that we met through the job fair in Lakeside in Etched in Bone. We get to see what happens with them once they make it to Bennet and how that town, Prarie Gold and it’s characters settled in. This ties up a lot of threads that were left open at the end of Etched in Bone. It also bring into the front a new element, a concept that has been flirted with throughout the original series, with the introduction of Joshua Painter.
While it is truly doubtful this is the end of the World of books, this book does not leave a reader with an obvious sense of where the next book is going to take them. I think it is a real possibility we will see a Hope book, but that isn’t clear. Or maybe we get to see more of Joshua’s story. It is just as likely we will see another unattached book like Lake Silence.
As is always my biggest complaint (if you can even call it that) about any Anne Bishop book is that it had to have a final page. I am never ready to step out of the worlds that she creates.
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