Direbound
The Wolves of Ruin #1
By: Sable Sorensen
Publisher: Self-Published
Publication date: Feb. 26, 2025
Genre: New Adult Fantasy
Rating:
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Only the worthy survive the Bonding Trials. She’ll risk her life—and her heart—to be one of them…
Meryn Cooper has never dreamed of being one of the Bonded, the King’s elite warriors who form mental links with massive, vicious direwolves. She’s made peace with her life scraping by in poverty in the shadows of the castle. But then her younger sister Saela is kidnapped, stolen across the border by the immortal monsters her country has spent centuries fighting.
And Meryn’s world falls apart.
Desperate to cross the front and save her sister, Meryn enlists in the army—only to discover that there are Bonding Trials this year, where all soldiers are forced to risk their lives in an attempt to connect with a direwolf. It’s too late to turn back; Meryn is thrown into the deadly competition against her will.
Now, she’ll need to survive the next four months of training at the castle if she wants a chance of finding Saela. Everything here is a test, from the brutal classes where one mistake means death, to the glittering court parties where every smile hides a knife.
To make things worse, Meryn is bound to a feral direwolf who refuses to communicate. The other trainees would love to spill her common blood. And her gorgeous instructor, Stark Therion, is as malicious as the wolves himself.
Everyone is out to get her—everyone but the dangerously handsome crown prince, Killian Valtiere. But if she loses her heart to him, she may also lose her life.
And the castle is hiding dark secrets…
My thoughts…
When Meryn’s sister is stolen in the middle of the night, she knows the only way to get to her is to join the military forces. By being on the front lines, she’s able to infiltrate the enemy territory and rescue her sister. However, it just so happens that this enlistment has a dire wolf bonding challenge. The bonded are the elite of fighters. Their skills in combat are not only formidable, but so are the dire wolves they ride and fight along side. The only problem with that, these bonding trials result in more death than successes, and they last 4 months.
I really enjoyed this story. We start of with Meryn in her poor neighborhood barely getting by. We are away of these vampire-like enemies that are extremely intelligent, but also very strong, fast, and almost unstoppable. The humans have been at war with them for decades. So when one of them sneaks into her town and steals her sister in the middle of the night, Meryn vows to do whatever she can to get her sister back, even if that means dying. During this story, we watch as Meryn joins the military only to discover that she now has to go through the dangerous bonding trials, and somehow ends up bonded to a very powerful dire wolf. A dire wolf that she has a hard time working with which quickly results in a riders death. As she learns to trust her wolf, hone her skills, and prepare to survive the trials, there are so many other things taking place in the story like romance, deceit, mystery, and friendship.
For obvious reasons, I don’t want to go into too much detail and give anything away. While I knew a couple of the pieces that were in play, I still found myself glued to the pages regardless. There’s just so much going on, that it was hard to put the book down at times. If you’re looking for a story that mixes Game of Thrones with Vampire Academy, you may want to give this one a try.
