Book Review: “Wolfsong” by T.J. Klune
Håfa adai! June is Pride Month in the United States. For the second to fourth Mondays of June, I will review works across various genres written by and/or depicting experiences of members of the LGBTQIA+ community. My third selection for Pride Month 2025 is Wolfsong, the first book in the Green Creek series by T.J. Klune.
This book review consists of two parts: a spoiler-free plot summary and my thoughts on the story. In the second part, I give my personal rating and break down the setting and worldbuilding, storytelling, cast of characters, and themes. There may be some lightweight spoilers—such as how characters interact with each other and the world around them—but I will not give away any major plot twists or endings. I want to share my opinions of the book and maybe encourage you to purchase a copy of your own.
Click on the tags at the bottom of this post to see all reviews with the same tags in the Fantasy bookshelf.
Spoiler-Free Plot Summary
When Oxnard Matheson’s father walked out on him and his mother Maggie, he told 12-year-old Ox that all he would ever get in this life is shit and that he just was not worth anything. His father’s external words became his internal voice. For years, Ox believed just that: that all he would get in life is shit, and that he is not worth anything. But all that began to change when the Bennetts moved into the abandoned house next door. Very quickly, the Bennetts—father Thomas, mother Elizabeth, sons Carter, Kelly, and Joe, and Uncle Mark—would see 16-year-old Ox and tell him that he was very special. Over the years, Ox would form an unbreakable bond with the family next door, especially with the youngest Bennett, earning their trust to the point the Bennetts could reveal their greatest secret to him: they are shapeshifters, werewolves. When a violent attack happens in his home, 23-year-old Ox’s life is turned upside down and the pack he has become a part of is torn in two, with Joe and a few others following a trail of revenge. For three years, Ox is left behind to pick up the pieces and protect those at home with him. When Joe and the others return, Ox must face the new people, the men, that he and Joe have become.
Important Trigger Warning for Wolfsong
Throughout Wolfsong, T.J. Klune attempts to portray many aspects of emotionally abusive relationships—including but not limited to emotional manipulation, coercive control, gaslighting, and intimidation—in a positive or normalized light. The age difference between certain characters and the way images of a character’s younger (underage) self are conjured during scenes of intimacy also feel gross and predatory. Please prioritize your own mental health before engaging with any work of fiction or non-fiction. If you do decide to read or listen to the audiobook of Wolfsong—and if these would cause you stress or distress in any way—then make sure to take the necessary steps to prepare and protect yourself before and after consuming this story.
My Thoughts on Wolfsong: 2 stars
The Green Creek series is currently widely popular among many fantasy readers throughout the United States. Set in the modern-day Pacific Northwest region of the United States, Wolfsong is framed as a queer coming-of-age story amidst the trauma of parental abandonment and the struggles of maintaining the balance between the natural and supernatural worlds. The novel follows the first-person perspective and experiences of Oxnard Matheson from his years as a teenager to his mid-20s as he becomes acquainted with and incorporated into the Bennett family, or wolfpack. Ox is a regular human being raised by a single mother in a modest home when he is forced into a fantastical world he had no idea existed.
Before I go into what I took issue with throughout Wolfsong, I want to touch on the aspects I appreciated about the story: the premise and worldbuilding. I am a lifelong fan of the fantasy genre. While most of the fantasy I prefer to read falls under the sub-genre of high fantasy, I have been developing a deeper appreciation for urban fantasy or contemporary fantasy in recent years. The premise of supernatural creatures, cryptids, or magic users secretly living alongside regular human beings in the modern-day state of Oregon in the United States is genuinely interesting! And the social politics of the werewolf communities throughout the country and beyond are more nuanced than I expected. But the couple things I appreciated about Wolfsong were greatly overshadowed by aspects of the story that truly did not sit well with me.
The aspects of Wolfsong I cannot ignore can be broken down into 6 categories: (1) lack of boundaries, (2) emotional manipulation, (3) coercive control, (4) constant minimizing and gaslighting, (5) inappropriate relationships, (6) poor character development, (7) misogyny, and (8) intense settler colonizer overtones. I recognize that these aspects of Wolfsong do not bother most fans of the Green Creek series—and this review is not any generalization of all T.J. Klune’s published works—but the book reviews I share on this blog are a reflection of my own personal takeaways and interpretations of any given book. I can only represent my own thoughts on the story, while understanding that I may not have a popular opinion of this particular book. I will be intentionally vague in discussing these categories to avoid giving away big spoilers, but it seems impossible to avoid spoiling a few scenes while explaining why these things bother me.
The first category that immediately stands out to the reader is the repeated gross lack of boundaries between characters, both physically and emotionally. Various members of the Bennett family are constantly touching, grabbing, pulling, and even crossing lines of intimacy with Ox without his consent. I am not a particularly touchy or handsy sort of person, so perhaps this is something that gave me the “ick” more than most. The Bennetts also place too many emotional demands on Ox from a far too early point in the story. The Bennetts do not really know Ox! And Ox does not really know them! It definitely took away from the emotional impact I think T.J. Klune was trying to convey.
The second, third, and fourth categories are all forms of emotional abuse, but I want to parse out the differences between them. Throughout Wolfsong, the Bennetts repeatedly withhold vital information from Ox and then outright tell Ox he cannot hold them accountable for their questionable actions because he does not know or understand the information they are withholding from him. That is emotional manipulation! In portraying the romantic relationship between Ox and another character, Ox does not enter the relationship after a realization of mutual feelings for that other character but after a loud temper tantrum thrown by that other character. It is not romantic if someone wields their trauma against you and frames it as if you owe them to return their feelings because of what they went through. There are also multiple points in the story where other forms of coercive control are used to manipulate characters. The fourth category is the constant minimizing and gaslighting of characters’ traumatic experiences. The minimizing and gaslighting is made worse when it is framed as if it were all a big joke.
The fifth category that bothers me are the various inappropriate relationships depicted between characters. For example, two characters who are later paired off as romantic partners met and were consistently part of each other’s lives when they were 16 and 10 years old. That is not okay! It made me so uncomfortable that I had to completely skip the erotic scene on pages 371-373 of the paperback. A later erotic scene, occurring on pages 399-400, contains elements that seem like intimidation and assault. Again, this made me so physically uncomfortable that I had to skip ahead to a later scene.
The sixth category I want to expand on is the poor character development. On one side of this category is that Oxnard Matheson himself—the protagonist whose first-person perspective the reader follows—seems to just exist. There is a moment here and there of self-awareness where he thinks critically of what the Bennetts are doing to him and making him feel but, for the most part, things just happen to him without him doing anything. On the other side of this category is that there are simply too many characters and very few distinct dialogue voices. I understand that a large cast of characters may be necessary to convey the populace of a werewolf pack. But what this comes across in Wolfsong is that the only character given the space to expand is Ox (via his first-person narrative) and so many other characters blend into one. For example, Carter and Kelly are virtually indistinguishable, Chris and Tanner blend into a single character, and the only way Rico is unique from Chris and Tanner is that his dialogue has the occasional Spanish word thrown into his speech.
The seventh category is the ways the characters throughout Wolfsong perpetuate misogyny. For example, it seems as if Elizabeth (the wife and mother of the Bennett family/pack) and Maggie (Ox’s mother) only exist to comfort and soothe the men and boy characters around them. Elizabeth and Maggie do not push against or question their actions or decisions, although they rarely pose questions for the men and boys to ask themselves without any later follow through. The character Jessie (Chris’ younger sister) only seems to exist to have a pre-coming-out-of-the-closet love interest for Ox and a later damsel in distress for the men in the group to rescue. And when she finally addresses her abduction and physical assault months later, those same men who were comforting each other about their past traumas only make fun of and ridicule her for her response to her traumatic experience! Without going into further detail, it goes to show that being queer and being an entitled misogynist are not mutually exclusive.
The eighth category that loudly stood out to me are the heavy overtones of settler colonialism. Throughout the story, Thomas Bennett (the patriarch or “alpha” of the Bennett wolf pack) repeatedly talks about “his territory” and “his land”, asserting his claim to an area that he had left for many years. Whenever this line came up in the story, my partner and I (both of us Indigenous people) would just say “Sir, you are on stolen land!” From what was presented of the worldbuilding in this first book of the series, the packs of werewolves are fighting each other for dominance of arbitrary borders whose significance was not made clear. It was also strange that Thomas Bennett was not willing to punish someone who violently and traumatically harmed members of his family, yet he would kill those who challenge his claim to ownership of his land or territory. It very much came across as though Thomas Bennett values his ownership of property more than he values the safety and wellbeing of his so-called pack, and this was probably the greatest influence of the side eye I was giving him.
My overall rating for T.J. Klune’s Wolfsong is 2 out of 5 stars. The Green Creek series is wildly popular among many fantasy readers today. I wanted to know what the hype was all about and was truly excited to experience one of its stories for the first time. While I usually read books to myself and on my own time, my partner and I read Wolfsong together and had many discussions about it along the way. The premise and setting of the story are very interesting, but the aspects of the storytelling that do not sit well with me are too great to ignore. I am currently reading In the Lives of Puppets, so I do not intend for my critique of Wolfsong to be a representation of all writing from T.J. Klune; the issues I articulate in this review only pertain to Wolfsong. In my excitement, I purchased the first three books of the Green Creek series and do plan on reviewing them at some point, but I am in no rush to get to them as there are other books and series I also want to experience soon. Ultimately, it bothers me so much that T.J. Klune’s writing in Wolfsong normalizes emotionally abusive relationships. I do not recommend Wolfsong.
Dångkulo' na' saina ma'åse'! Thank you so much for reading my review of Wolfsong by T.J. Klune.
Rating Cheat Sheet
4.75 - 5.00 stars: Everyone should read this book! (If you’re into that sort of thing.)
4.00 - 4.50 stars: I appreciated many aspects of this book. I recommend it!
3.00 - 3.75 stars: I liked some aspects of this book. I won’t revisit it, but someone else might really like it.
2.00 - 2.75 stars: There were some things I appreciated about this book, but I do not recommend it.
0.25 - 1.75 stars: I do not recommend this book. I did not enjoy or appreciate the experience of it.
Post Date: 16 June 2025
Published: 20 June 2016 by Dreamspinner Press
Republished: 4 July 2023 by Tor Books
