This book reads like a Jack London wannabe. Kazan is a wolf-dog hybrid torn between life in the wild and life with humans. Despite being born among humans, his learning to survive in the wild happens virtually overnight, instead of the gradual progress of Buck in Jack London’s classic The Call of the Wild, and there is almost no character development.

The author seems to know little about the animals he’s writing about, possibly due to the lack of research that had been done at the time. The words “horns” and “antlers” are used interchangeably (they are different structures), lynxes are stated to have twenty claws (they have eighteen), and a female caribou is referred to as a doe (they’re actually called cows). Some of the wolf behaviour is downright ridiculous, such as a wolf pack turning on and eating (!) their leader after Kazan defeats him in a fight, and Kazan’s son leaving his parents at only a couple of months old.

The edition I read had a few noticeable typos, in particular mixing up Bs and Hs, so you get “hut” instead of “but” or “hull” instead of “bull”. One character is introduced as Harker, yet is referred to as Barker at least twice. This is presumably the fault of Mint Editions, the producers of this version, rather than the author himself.