Miller’s sophisticated and resonant parable about inequality hits the right tone with empathy and revelation. Seventeen-year-old human, Rikki, is a midnight rider, a racer who rides the fire-breathing hell-horse, Elchron. His racing partner and frenemy, Darian, is a lupista, a wolf-like humanoid with big ears, fur, and a tail. In church, humans and lupista are taught that through the higher power’s grace, lupista successfully protested their enslavement by the humans and now live in peace as equals. Skeptical Darian, who lives with oppression every day, is tired of being told he should be grateful for what lupista have. He tells Rikki that the truth of this “tolerant” society lurks in the church’s basement. There, Rikki encounters a dangerous-looking manticore—part tiger and scorpion with a human face—who convinces him that society still separates humans and lupista. “I bet you never even considered it possible: a world without labeled categories of people,” it said. Rikki makes it his mission to convince the town of the injustice. Carefully written with allegory, acerbic observation, and the striking details that bring an imagined world to life, the story navigates one side’s propaganda versus the other side’s lived reality: theaters feature lupista actors only as background characters, scientists claim lupista are inferior because their brains are wired differently, and there’s the derogatory name Footsies because lupista don’t wear shoes. At first Rikki is blunt, confronting clueless humans with insults, which only causes more adversity. But when the manticore’s solution is to kill anyone who disagrees, Rikki realizes that Darian and even Elchron have roles to play in making people listen.
With engaging, swift-moving prose, appealing dialogue, and much emotional urgency, Miller’s inventive fantasy setting reveals the truths and lessons we can learn for our own society. This consequential, fast-paced fable is captivating for its diplomacy and heart. A fantastic and timely allegory, this is fantasy at its best.
Takeaway: Relevant fantasy parable about social injustice between humans and werewolves.
Comparable Titles: Susan Dennard’s The Luminaries, TJ Klune’s Wolfsong.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
