Reviews of Nadya: The Wolf Chronicles

— from Publishers Weekly

— from Bookwoman

I sure enjoy Pat Murphy's writing. I am a new convert, but I'm doing my best to catch up. I recently read and reviewed two of her other books, The Falling Woman and The City, Not Long After, both of which I really enjoyed. Murphy's genre is science fiction/fantasy, and I see from the publisher's blurb that she has also recently published a children's picture book, Pigasus.

Nadya is a book about werewolves. Usually, I would quickly put a book about werewolves right back on the shelf, since I am not interested in werewolf stories. But this book is really about people, people you will quickly come to care very much about, who just happen to become wolves one night a month. This novel takes place during the American land/gold rush and westward migration of the 1830's. Nadya and her parents (also werewolves, of course), live near the Missouri wilderness. After hunters kill her parents while they are in their wolf shape, Nadya sets out toward the west, destination Oregon (good choice!). Along the way, she meets Elizabeth, who has also lost almost all she has to lose, and their paths and lives become intertwined in love and adventure.

Murphy's hypnotic pacing will grab you by the second page. This is a book which, given a little time and solitude, you could happily read in one sitting. In fact, I recommend that you not even start reading it until you can let yourself sink comfortably into its well-researched evocation of that time in American history. I've read quite a bit about wolf behavior, also, and I think that Murphy has accurately portrayed them here.

Murphy's writing is a melodic symphony of complex relationships and cinemagraphic milieu, with hardly ever a jarring note.

— from Anything That Moves
Reviewed by Mark Silver

All sorts of changeling things, werewolves not the least among them, inhabited my childhood imagination. I dreamed of turning into a superhero and flying away from bullies at school. I imagined discovering that I was a space alien with super powers who would recall his exciting mission when his memories were activated by the proximity of some Mother Ship. And I dreamed of changing into a werewolf on the full moon and running away from the nice, quiet, homogeneous, stifling, boring suburbs I was growing up in at the time.

Little did I know that I would grow up to be a queer Witch, as close to a werewolf as the suburbs see these days. No fangs, though—just stiletto heels and sage smudge. In Nadya, Pat Murphy has written the kind of rich story I missed growing up. In it, Nadya—a young woman descended from a long line of Eastern European werewolves, whose family has been forced to emmigrate to the New World—is forced to make her own way in the early 1800s. Trying to find space away from wolfhunters and their hounds, Nadya soon finds that even the unfenced wilds of the new American east coast are closing in, especially when she and her parents "change" with each full moon. Tragedy eventually forces her to follow the wagon trail to the west coast. Of course, she finds lots of romance and adventure along the way.

Murphy's book is a really good read. I'm no authority on the time period, so I can't speak for its historical accuracy, but it feels real enough. It's one of the few novels I've read set before the raping of the American west that makes clear what the untouched beauty of this land might have felt like, especially if you walked the entire 3,000 miles from one end to the other. Pat deals empathetically and justly with the Native American tribes Nadya encounters along the way, showing a richness and depth to their culture that belies the now-stale stereotype of "injuns" as savages without idealizing them.

The book's lesson is clear: Fear of difference is what causes the most harm, whether it is a different gender role (Nadya is a perfect prototype for a can-do feminist), a different culture, or a difference in whom you love.

Ah, yes, sweet love, and lust. Interwoven in the book, natural as can be and without a hint of overdone identity politics, is bisexuality. Not the word (it's the 1800s), but Nadya has a strong and clear bisexual history, and she is only confused about other people's confusion with her.

With Nadya, Murphy provides a really good story, well-written, with sympathetic characters who just happen to fall in love with whomever they please, back and forth across any and all fences, and it ain't a big deal.

Nadya is epic in scope, very complete, and comes full circle. And its ending reminds us that the suburbs don't always win—sometimes you find werewolves to hold back the sweeping tide of homogeneity.

You don't have to believe me, but stay inside on the full moon. It's safer.

And it's a good time to get a little reading done.

— from Lambda Book Report
reviewed by Lawrence Schimel

Pat Murphy's latest novel, Nadya, is a chronicle of an uncommon woman's trek across the American West, blending myth and magical realism with historical detail of life on the frontier.

The book opens with an account of Nadya's parents, a Polish imigree and a French harlot, both werewolves who meet in New Orleans. Their quiet life as Nadya grows to maturity in the outskirts of Missouri wilderness in the 1830s is evocatively detailed in the first third of the novel. Nadya learns all sorts of unwomanly tasks: to shoot a rifle, to hunt, to wear britches and straddle a horse when she rides. And on nights of the full moon, the three of them roam the forest as wolves. As Nadya comes into her sexual maturity, the wolf's unsubtle passion lead her to fall in love with an uncouth lad, who ultimately (and unsurprisingly) betrays her.

In the second section of the book—Nadya's trek across the frontier to the fertile promised lands of the west coast—she is fleeing from Rufus and the consequences of her animal lust for him. She's chopped off her hair, disguised herself as a man, and calls herself Nat in hopes of misleading pursuit. She travels alone—orphaned from her pack and not fitting in with human "civilization"—until she encounters an overeducated, highly Christian woman whose wagon was abandoned by their caravan when her father, now dead, took ill with fever and they could not keep pace. Nadya befriends and, eventually, falls in love with Elizabeth, who at first responds to Nadya's male exterior and later reciprocates Nadya's passion, even after discovering that Nat is in fact a woman, although refusing ever to talk about their desire. Elizabeth is constantly frightened by Nadya's wildness, while attracted to it at the same time. But she is unequal to the task of ignoring her cultural upbringing, and after an arduous journey, they at last reach California where Elizabeth reverts to a "proper" civilized and straight-laced feminine role, suppressing the liberated and uninhibited desires and activities she'd grown into while trekking across the dangerous unknown territories without the aid of men.

Nadya—half woman, half wolf—has never fit in with this sort of civilization, and leaves Elizabeth, heading north to Oregon. She is shot by hunters while in wolf form, and is rescued by a half white, half indian man—a misfit like herself—who's fallen in love with her after they both were on the same side of a barroom fight against some drunken sailors. He brings her to two indian women, a berdash and her wife, who heal Nadya, and welcome her into their community. They are all outsiders, falling between the cracks, between communities, and they create a haven of their own on the Pacific Northwest coast.

Nadya is at the same time an event-filled adventure novel, and a quiet, observant book of the natural world. Anyone who has ever felt like they did not fit in with the world—and what queer, at some point in their life, has not?—is sure to find resonances in Nadya's journey to find a place for herself to call home.

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