GUARDIANS OF THE TAIGA

A girl and her wolf pack perform animal rescues in this series opener from the YouTuber best known as StacyPlays.

Twelve-year-old Stacy has been living in the taiga (defined in an appended glossary) with a pack of arctic wolves for the past four years, with only the barest hints of memories at her life before that. These wolves can understand her, communicate with her with body language, and even take care of her education (an intellectual wolf named Addison likes to swipe reading materials for Stacy). Together, Stacy and her wolves engage in daring rescues of other animals in dramatic settings. On one of these rescues, they save a little dog, Page, from a pack of wild wolves. (Page is named after the author’s real dog; she can communicate with bats.) This growing, hungry pack causes trouble for Stacy’s wolves, as their hunting farm animals prompts nearby humans to push for a bounty on wolves to thin the population. Developers who wish to turn the entire area into a luxury resort pose an additional threat. The animals’ uneven levels of anthropomorphization and intelligence are never explained; questions of Stacy’s backstory too are left unanswered. Undemanding and episodic, the book concludes with a blurb about the author’s trip to the taiga, a profile of the real-life Page, and, in a welcome departure from self-promotion, a profile of a wolf researcher.

Doesn’t set itself apart from the rest of the animal-rescue pack.