I'm still amused and interested by this series -- now the wolf men need someone to fight -- enter Romans! Perfect. I'm so enjoying this very fantastical-historical story. ( )

3.9 stars. Fun page turner. Less of the hot and heavy than in Book 1. I'm ready for the next one! ( )

This sequel to a Companion to Wolves has a very different feel to it, but is still very readable. What do you do when the Epic Battle is won, the trolls are defeated, and you are halls of Viking Warriors psychically bonded to wolves with no enemy left to fight? I liked seeing the hero of the last book through other's eyes, and I loved the discovery of the svartalfar, and the subtle change of the elves from 'the mystical Other' to people with their own intricate differences and politics. ( )

Really enjoyed the first, but just could NOT get into this one at all. Sent it back to the library. ( )

I read the first novel in this trilogy, A Companion to Wolves, together with Leander from The Idle Woman blog and urge you all to read her excellent review to get an idea of what it is about.

If you check out the reviews of this second volume at Goodreads or Amazon, you are going to find a lot of complaints about its disjointed plot or even the absence of a plot at all. Those are not quite wrong as statement of fact, but I think they’re not really valid as complaints, because, like its predecessor, The Tempering of Men is not really about plot, what there is of it is mostly a vehicle for other things. At their heart, both novels of this trilogy which I’ve read so far, are not the traditional Fantasy novels they might at first glance appear to be, but rather an in-depth analysis of various Fantasy tropes (I’d even say a deconstruction, but recent usage of that term has been sloppy to a degree that makes it pretty much useless).

The first novel was quite clearly about animal bonding and gender; while it’s plot was also rather episodic it presented a tightly-knit web of motifs and images around those central themes. It is a bit harder to make out what The Tempering of Men is about, and I think it is chiefly this which has caused many readers, even those who enjoyed A Companion to Wolves, problems with its sequel.

The Tempering of Men is told from three points of view, none of which is Isolfr who was the protagonist of the first volume and on whom we get several fascinating outside perspectives here. Each of those gets his own narrative thread, and in an interesting narrative move each of those threads describes a different kind of encounter: with animals, with non-human sentients, with other humans. Each of those threads then is resolved in a different manner: the first with violence, the second with diplomacy, the third with a mixture of both. Obviously, the authors (and I consider both Monette and Bear to be among the most intelligent currently working in the SFF field) put some thought into this, and even if the threads have only a superficial connection as regards plot, they are firmly linked on a thematic level, running underneath the surface action. And I think that from the interplay between those threads (and there is a lot of mirroring back and forth going on), there arises the central concern of this novel which, if I’d have to nail it down in word, would be consequences.

Your classic Epic Fantasy novel always has some kind of Evil Power trying to take over, and once our heroes have defeated the evil overlord everything is presumed to return to the status quo ante. Not so here: After they defeated the trolls and killed the trollqueen the wolfthreat have pacified the North – and got rid of their own raison d’être. They face the choice to other fade into insignificance and eventually disappear or to find some new reason for being and for the wolfless men to give them support and tithe boys. In short, this novels poses the question of what happens after the good guys have won, and while it suggests some answers it does not settle on a single one. The Tempering of Men is much more interested in working through the problem then coming up with a solution, and generally showing that things are rarely as neat as traditional Fantasy Epics like to paint them but tend to be considerably more messy – which very likely also is a reason why so many readers were frustrated with this novel. But I strongly suspect that frustrating readers’ expectations also was a major part of the authors’ narrative strategy, and generally your enjoyment of The Tempering of Men (and probably the trilogy as a whole) will depend on whether you like that kind of thing or not. For my part, I do (a lot) and am already looking forward to reading the concluding volume.