#dogchild

The main character is Jeet, a teenager who was raised by dogs and who starts to see the rot at the top of his society. He’s a decent person - initially loyal to his people, but starting to drift when he sees that the sheriff’s definitely in league with their enemies and responsible for some really bad shit. He makes for a good narrator, and his unique POV carries the story even when it strayed into being a bit obvious. Yes, the wise old mentor gets offed midway through the book. Hands up who didn’t see that coming. Jeet, however, is in this liminal space between humanity and the animals, and his dual nature of both dog and person feeds into his narration and perspective.

Chola Se is the secondary character, a girl who is kidnapped early on and given to the enemy group. She escapes thanks to Jeet, and they engage in a weird relationship - their feelings are hard for both of them to work out, as both are dogchildren, but they get each other on a level that the other human-raised humans don’t seem to understand. She’s deeply traumatised, and her journey is of understanding and dealing with her trauma, both through revenge on the perpetrator and through compartmentalising her identity, splitting the Chola Se that the trauma happened to from the Chola Se she is now. Her story is interesting, and provides a good contrast for the comparatively less violent Jeet.

There is one thing I couldn’t get over in this one, which is the weirdness with the style. See, Jeet’s one of a few literate people in this world, and his spelling and punctuation is choppy, reflecting the lack of reading and writing in this dystopian world. And yet Jeet has an amazingly large vocabulary for a semi-literate dogchild. It feels like Brooks wanted to have his narrative cake and eat it too - he wanted to have his narrator be this barely literate post-apocalyptic teen, but also have pretty descriptions of things. He should have stuck to one or the other, because these two things don’t mesh well for me.

Other than that, though, I really enjoyed the world and the worldbuilding here. It’s made clear early on that Jeet only really knows the lore around his world as it relates to what’s relevant to him, and that a lot of knowledge from the world that was has been lost. Jeet describes the key things to us, but it really amounts to his people and the folks they’re fighting, plus the wasteland where the feral dogs run. There’s a lot of gaps being left, and I like that! Jeet has no reason to know anything more than that, and it’s not relevant to the story, so we don’t get to know it either.