Spirit Walker – Book Review

Moderate spoilers for Spirit Walker throughout. The ending of Spirit Walker is also spoiled.

I’m back again with a review of Wolf Brother’s sequel, Spirit Walker! This is book two in Michelle Paver’s nine book long series, ‘The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’, and it’s another good one.

More of a Good Thing

Spirit Walker is a lot like Wolf Brother. The protagonists—Torak, Renn, and Wolf—are all still very young, cute, and trying their best. ­

Unlike Wolf Brother which largely sticks to the forest, Spirit Walker takes Torak across the seas where he is even more out of his depth. Torak can survive in the forest, but by the sea he is helpless. It’s up to Renn and Wolf to find him and help him achieve his survival and goals.

That’s right, despite the ending of its predecessor, Wolf quickly returns to the narrative! It wouldn’t be ‘The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’ without him! His return does undermine the ending of Wolf Brother a little, but I try not to think about it too much because Wolf is such a brilliantly written character that I don’t mind.

The Sickness

One of the key themes of this book is sickness. Unfortunately, I was reading this book whilst suffering with COVID, and the descriptions of the fear and mania surrounding the afflicted struck me much harder than I remembered them doing when I first read this book as a kid.

I think it’s likely that my generation is going to suffer a collective PTSD regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite having lived through the horror of a real pandemic, Paver succeeded in envisioning that same horror over a decade before COVID struck. The sickness trapped within Spirit Walker is still terrifying today.

Especially the bit where a minor side character starts eating their own scabs. That section is so brilliantly revolting.

The Darkness Descends…

Wolf Brother wasn’t the lightest kid’s book I’ve ever read. It opened with the brutal death of Torak’s father which was swiftly followed by the death of Wolf’s entire pack. It’s not a cute book, but Spirit Walker goes a step further.

In this book, our protagonists are hounded by demon children called Tokoroths. At least, that’s how they’re perceived by our protagonists and their society, but it isn’t clear whether the magic in Wolf Brother and Spirit Walker is real or imagined. To a modern reader, the tokoroths might not be children magically possessed by demons (and therefore ripe for the killing), but instead just normal children deprived of love, language, and so much more. I think that’s what makes them so terrifying. They’re just another set of victims, but they’re also villains within this narrative.

They tempt the reader to simply see them as Torak’s enemies and to mourn the children that they were before the demons took hold, but I worried that they were still those same children, twisted by years of tormented upbringing. No demons involved.

The ending also had a particularly dark aftertaste. Torak vanquishes the evil sorcerer only to find out, moments before he perishes, that this sorcerer is his uncle. It’s bitter because Torak had another living relative without even knowing it, but that relative only succeeded in hurting him further.

As Torak and Renn get older, we can all assume that things aren’t going to get easier as more innocence is lost. Perhaps the series title, ‘The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’, refers to more than just the era Renn and Torak live in…

Barking Up the Wrong Tree – Iffy Endings?

This remains one of my favourite books in the series, however, like book one its ending is fairly weak and unsatisfying. If it weren’t for the fact that I can immediately start reading the following book, I would be disappointed that we never get to see a final conversation between Renn and Torak over the troubling final events. I can’t imagine (or remember) reading these as they came out and having to wait over a year for closure.

On the other hand, maybe this is an expert tactic to encourage readers to buy the next book in the series?

Even if that’s true, I can’t help but feel that the endings (or lack thereof) brings both books down a little. Not enough to stop me rating them 5/5 stars on Goodreads, but enough that it’s worth mentioning on my personal blog.

Final Thoughts

I loved this book. The sea clans are so wonderfully different to what we’ve seen of the forest. It’s full of new survival tactics which are so interesting to learn about in the context of Torak’s continued fight for survival!

It’s a fantastic sequel to Wolf Brother and gives me plenty of excitement for the next book, Soul Eater.