Tabs’ review of Wild Country (The World Of The Others, Book 2) by Anne Bishop
Fantasy Romance published by Ace 5 Mar 19
Anne Bishop’s Others Series is a dark fantasy series set in an alternate history world where paranormal beings, colloquially known as “The Others,” are the original indigenous earth species and humans are only allowed to live in their lands at their discretion. When the humans screw up and try to take over, they get eaten. Wild Country is a post-apocalyptic western that focuses on the reestablishment of a hybrid community in the western town of Bennet. The setup is a classic western, one with a town fighting against disreputable outlaws trying to take over.
Content Warnings: self-harm; on-page rape and torture
I really enjoyed the last standalone book in this world, Lake Silence, but this one doesn’t work as well for me. First of all, it isn’t as stand-alone. If you aren’t caught up on the primary series and don’t want to be spoiled about major events in Books 4 and 5, don’t read this one. Second, its structure is a big mess. The first third of the book is more than a hundred pages of info dump about the cast of thousands who live in the area and a great deal of detail about which businesses will be reopened and run by whom and how. One of the primary POV characters, human police officer Jana Paniccia, doesn’t even set foot in the town until past the 30% mark.
The Others who run the town are incredibly wary of humans, after a massive slaughter of their kind, so they set up rules about who can and cannot come into town. They then proceed to strictly follow those rules right up until it becomes necessary to the plot progression for everyone to suddenly become incompetent and lax about security. A number of things about this book frustrated me, but this was the biggest source of my frustration. If you’re going to set up the rules of your world, you can’t break them just to make the plot work.
The misogyny of this world is also not a thing that I particularly enjoy. The POV characters are overwhelming male and it, frankly, gets exhausting. If I never hear a male Other patronizingly refer to a “spirited” human female as an “exploding fluffball,” I will live a happy life. I also really could have done without the slutty female character who likes kink and who only exists so that she can become a graphically violent plot device. This does not make me a pleased reader.
I’m still working my way through the original series, but I don’t know if I have enough steam to finish it. The elements that I enjoy in these books are often overshadowed by the elements that I’m less fond of. I appreciate the sly humor that sneaks into the series. I also rather appreciate watching entitled white men get eaten by monsters, but it was less effective in this book because of the number of casualties these villains leave in their wake.
Grade: C-
Summary:
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.
Other books in this series:
