Way of the Wolf (Magnetic Magic, Book 1)
Hello, all. Welcome back.
As promised back in my review of The Demon’s Eye, I’m going to start doing more indie fiction. I figured a good place to start was the only indie author whose works I remembered fondly despite being burned out by the indie market: Lindsay Buroker.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lindsay Buroker’s Amazon bio reads thusly.
Lindsay is a full-time independent fantasy and science fiction author who loves travel, hiking, tennis, and vizslas. She's written over ninety novels, appeared on the USA Today bestseller list, and has twice been nominated for a Goodreads Readers' Choice Award.
Ninety novels is quite a lot. Buroker’s secret is simplicity. She writes novels that are fairly short (Way of the Wolf is about 57,000 words) with plots and character arcs that are streamlined. This allows her to pump out multi-book sagas at a tremendous pace, sometimes as rapidly as of one book per month (case and point: Way of the Wolf released in the first week of January, and while the sequel, Relics of the Wolf, released in the last week of January). It also allows her to react quickly to reader demand - I distinctly remember that her Sky Full of Stars series was canceled, rather than reaching a natural end point, with her immediately pivoting to a Fantasy series.
I wouldn't say that Buroker is one of those authors whose work defines a generation (for better or worse). Rather, she publishes fun stories to meet audience demand. She’s found her niche, and she’s demonstrated great dedication to meeting the demands of that niche audience.
When I decided to check out more indie books, my first thought was to see what Buroker was up to these days. Magnetic Magic is her most recent series, so while I’m not usually an Urban Fantasy person, I thought it would be a good stick to measure where she’s at now as a writer.
STATS
Title: Way of the Wolf
Series: Magnetic Magic (Book 1)
Author(s): Lindsay Buroker
Genre: Fantasy (Urban)
First Printing: January 2025
Publisher: Self-published to Amazon
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for the entirety of Way of the Wolf will be provided throughout this review. The first paragraph of any given section will be kept spoiler-free. Any heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
STRUCTURE
We’ll be keeping this one simple:
Premise
Rating
Series
Plot
Character
Worldbuilding
Prose / Editing
PREMISE
From the Amazon product page, we get:
You can only escape your destiny for so long…
It’s been more than twenty years since tragedy prompted Luna Valens to walk away from her pack.
Scarred by her past, she’s done her best to lead a normal human life. Thanks to a potion that suppresses her magic, nobody around her has a clue that she’s a werewolf.
Until…
Her potion supplier disappears, her family reestablishes contact, and a mysterious werewolf with a metal detector and a penchant for calling her my lady saunters into her life.
As if all that weren’t enough, someone from her past is trying to kill her. Someone dangerous.
To survive and figure out what’s going on, Luna will have to once again embrace her power. But, after so long, will she be able to summon the wolf?
~
A contemporary fantasy series for those enjoy second-chance stories, slow-burn romance, and werewolves with a sense of humor. Pick up Way of the Wolf today!
Reaction
This premise is right on the money. Everything promised here is delivered upon, and nothing is being given focus in excess of what it actually receives in the book. Really the only complaint I have here is the “werewolves with a sense of humor” bit, but that’s more of a subjective issue that I have with one of the characters involved in the comedic aspects of the story. I’ll get into him later on.
RATING: 6.5/10
Way of the Wolf is one of those stories that is both simple and honest about what it is. It may not be redefining the literary landscape, but it is a fun, functional, and effective work of escapist fiction. If you are a fan of Buroker and/or like the premise, you will most likely be satisfied by this story.
I did consider a higher rating for this book. However, I strongly feel that the ending of this book was fumbled. Some of this comes down to subjective taste, but there are multiple rushed payoffs that end up leaving the book on an anticlimactic note.
SERIES STRUCTURE
The way that Buroker writes a series is very similar to serialized television. She sets up character motivations and some overarching goals in the first book, and then each book (including the first) encompasses a single milestone along that journey. The result is that each book is partially satisfying. While each story is able to stand on its own, you can’t get the full narrative experience without going on to the next book, and the next, until finally the series is done. Given how quickly she puts these books out, this seems like a winning strategy for her. She able to lock in an audience with her first book and then get them to buy the whole series while their interest is at its peak.
As I recall, this strategy was executed well with her Fallen Empire series. Sky Full of Stars was a different matter. I don’t recall there being a strong core idea to hold that series together, and as a result, it quickly became aimless.
It’s hard to judge how well this works for Magnetic Magic from just the first book. Looking at just Way of the Wolf, I see good and bad here. Buroker does set up plenty of interesting story elements and character motivations to maintain momentum going through the series. However, in the process, she allowed the ending of this book to fall by the wayside.
A Path Forward (Heavy Spoilers)
Right off the bat, Buroker lays ample groundwork to propel an entire series. Some of these plot threads were already covered in the Premise. Luna’s relationship with her family is a big driver of events in this story and has been set up to keep events moving in future installments. The “mysterious werewolf” who enters her life, Duncan, is also set up to be a recurring character.
Not mentioned within this Premise are a pair of additional mysteries that appear as events progress and are left open-ended at the end of the book:
The nature of a druidic artifact that Luna finds in her apartment, as well as the identity of who stole the artifact from her before the book’s end. (How the artifact got there is explained before the end of the book.)
The question of who planted a pair of enchanted spy cameras in Luna’s ceiling.
Crash Ending (Heavy Spoilers)
While there’s plenty to make me want to read the next book, the ending of this book is rushed and anticlimactic. It feels like Buroker didn’t properly pace things out and had to rush conclusions.
The climax of this book sees Luna rejoin her family to hunt as a werewolf during the full moon. It’s there we learn that the individual who was trying to kill her was her cousin Augustus, due to reasons related to werewolf pack politics. Much like the reveal of the One God’s true identity in Dragons of a Lost Star, this is certainly a reveal that makes sense, yet it’s also a letdown. Augustus had already tried to kill Luna earlier in the book, and Luna knew he’d tried to kill her, so this wasn’t a twist. At the same time, this book hadn’t really been building up to a battle between werewolves in their wolf form. More focus was put on Luna being able to transform at all. The result was a final confrontation that felt very paint-by-numbers.
Then there is the mystery of what happened to Luna’s potion supplier. At first, this seems like it’s merely something to trigger the events of the story. Luna needs the potion to suppress her werewolf side, the full moon is rapidly approaching, and now her supplier has vanished without warning her and without any means for Luna to contact her. The idea is floated at one point that maybe someone abducted, killed, or scared off the supplier as a means to force Luna to become a werewolf again, but it’s not something that the story really dwells on. Then, after the climax, once Luna has fended off Augustus, another of her cousins comes up to her and basically says, “Yeah, we scared her off because we knew you needed to have your magic against to protect yourself from Augustus.” It’s a reveal that feels like an afterthought rather than a reward. I honestly think that never revealing the answer (or, at least, not revealing it in this book) would have been the more narratively satisfying option here.
There’s also a forced character arc. One of the secondary characters in this book is Bolin, the son of the family who owns the apartment complex that Luna manages. He’s sent by his family to intern with Luna before they’ll entrust him with an accountant’s position at one of their more prestigious properties. At the beginning of the book, he’s presented as this uptight rich kid who’s smart but has no worldly experience, desperate to get the internship over with as soon as possible. Then, at the end of the book, he’s suddenly talking about how he’s enjoying the internship, as if he learned some lesson or had a profound experience. The only events that happen in between are that Bolin gets beaten by an unknown thug while visiting the apartment complex at night, which really should solidify his initial belief that he doesn’t belong there. This is a small thing, but Buroker chose to shine a spotlight on it, so the fact that it goes off like a wet firecracker is worth calling out. This is a payoff that really needed to wait for a later book.
The long and short of it is, while the series as a whole looks promising, this book feels like it was abandoned at the end, as if Buroker just wanted to insert an endpoint so that she could shift focus to Relics of the Wolf.
PLOT
I honestly don’t have much to say about the plot. This narrative is driven by characters. The events that the characters actually experience aren’t particularly remarkable on their own.
Since I’ve been making a big deal about the handling of mysteries in other works, I will say that the mysteries in this book are functional. Buroker doesn’t necessary make the solving of these mysteries the focus, but she does keep the questions in focus. Luna makes decisions as a response to these unanswered questions, and while she can’t answer them herself, she does choose to put her faith in people who can find those answers for her.
CHARACTER
While this book does have a decently-sized cast for such a straightforward story, there are only three characters who truly drive events.
Luna
Our main character “isn’t your typical werewolf” (according to Buroker herself in the Foreword of the novel). She’s a “middle-aged, divorced empty-nester” who started suppressing her werewolf nature with potions at the age of nineteen, after she killed the werewolf she loved. She’s a character who only wants to associate with the magical world in general to the minimum extent needed to facilitate her integration with the human world. Her life is defined by her job as manager of an apartment complex.
Luna’s arc throughout this book is about deciding whether or not to embrace her werewolf heritage. This is partially pushed along by her potion supplier disappearing right when she’s running low on potion and partially triggered by a werewolf trying to kill her. This leads to her making contact with the rest of her family for the first time in twenty-six years. Things really start to accelerate when Luna’s mother, who leads their pack, is revealed to have terminal cancer, with her urging Luna to return to the back and take over at the leader (due to magical elements involving the strength of their bloodline).
Luna isn’t what I’d consider to be an active protagonist. I think the only genuinely proactive decision she makes is to put her trust in her intern, Bolin. That backfires on her, but at least it was a decision she made without any prompting. Everything else is just a reaction to the various events being thrown at her.
Nevertheless, I found Luna to be an enjoyable character to read. She’s an Everywoman character who’s trying to avoid the trauma of her past and hold on to the life she’s made for herself while her past makes every effort to drag her back into her old life. Both her struggle and the way she engages with problems feel very relatable.
Duncan
I really, really don’t like this character.
Duncan, the “mysterious werewolf with a metal detector and a penchant for calling her my lady”, enters the story in Chapter 1, when Luna catches him parked illegally at her apartment complex while he uses his metal detector in the adjacent greenbelt. He quickly exhausted my patience with his quippy humor and over-the-top chivalric attitude. Maybe Buroker wrote him to charm a certain audience, but I most certainly am not in that audience. Nearly everything he said or did was incredibly grating for me.
Narratively, I do think Duncan is effective for his role within the plot. He’s clearly Luna’s love interest for the series, meant to win her over with roguish charm despite her immense cynicism about relationships (due to her ex-husband’s infidelity. There certainly is chemistry between the two. He also plays a major role in drawing Luna back into the magical world, helping Luna to uncover magic around her complex and helping her transition back into werewolf life before she confronts her family.
I sincerely hope Buroker dials back his personality in future books. She can’t outright replace him without having to partially reset Luna’s character development, so he does need to come back in future books. I just know he’s going to annoy me when he does reappear.
Bolin
The son of the owners of the complex where Luna works, Bolin wants to be anywhere else. His family promised him a job with their company after graduation, but they mandated that he work as Luna’s intern for a few months first. He’s less than pleased to discover that this will have less to do with spreadsheets and finances and more with fixing toilets and addressing mold problems. This is fairly shallow character work, but it’s serviceable. I’d also argue it’s relatable. Most of us may not come from the wealth that Bolin does, but having to work an undesirable job is pretty universal.
Bolin has one other facet to his character: he dabbles in druidic magic. He is aware of the magical world, though he doesn’t realize that Luna is a werewolf (or, for that matter, that werewolves are even real). Whereas Duncan actively pulls Luna back into the magical world, Bolin is more of a helpful source of information, digging up information on her behalf.
Bolin is a far more likeable character that Duncan. However, as covered up above, his character arc in this book is incredibly rushed. It reads as if Buroker took development that was meant to happen by the end of the second or third book and slammed it into this book to create a sense of something being resolved.
WORLDBUILDING
This is a very off-the-shelf, trope-heavy Urban Fantasy. We know werewolves are real, as are witches and druids (in the sense of archetypal Fantasy magic users, not religiously); ghosts and the paranormal are at least implied to be real based on references to adventures Duncan as been on. With how things are presented, there’s really nothing to say that this isn’t a setting where literally all things fantastical coexist in some corner of the world.
Overall, if you like Urban Fantasy stories are aren’t overly particular about the details, I think you’ll like this setting well enough.
Werewolves
Most of the worldbuilding is, naturally, focused here. In this setting, werewolves are more like the werewolves from the Twilight series than anything else I could name, being human beings who transform into wolves, with the transformation coming more readily and more powerfully during the full moon. Their magic can be suppressed with potions, and a child of a pure human and a werewolf will be human. The magic of werewolves has been weakening for some time. The natural world’s magic is dying as humanity develops more and more of the planet; this has robbed werewolves of their ability to turn humans into werewolves. This has, in turn, created a genetic bottleneck, further weakening the werewolves as they started to inbreed.
There is a way to restore the werewolves: restoring that ability to add new blood to the packs. Unfortunately, this ability is only possessed by the bipedfuris, and no werewolf has been able to …
…
Bipedfuris?
Biped furries?
…
I laughed very hard when I saw that name in the text, and since I won’t be able to finish this review if I need to type “bipedfuris” on a regular basis, I am not going to keep calling them that. We’re going to use D&D terminology going forward.
As I was saying, the ability to turn humans into werewolves is only possessed by a werewolf in hybrid form (between human and wolf). This is symptom of fading magic that I mentioned up above. However, hope may not be lost for Luna’s pack. She has very strong magic, and her mother strongly believes that she has a potential to someday unlock the hybrid form.
Magic
Magic in this setting is very soft. The case of the werewolves at least implies that all magic is ultimately drawn from the natural world - and that’s about all we really have to go on. Its natural origins don’t mean that magic is incompatible with technology, though. Duncan has a metal detector-like device that can pick up on magic, and spy cameras are found that have enchantments placed upon them.
I think Buroker handles soft magic quite well. Magic is not, in and of itself, a solution to problems. It’s mostly a flag of something plot relevant.
Knowledge
One thing that is very unclear in this story is exactly how much of the magical world is secret and why.
There’s no Masquerade in place. No magical government presides over everyone. Duncan posts his paranormal investigations to YouTube. Druidism texts are apparently easy to come by. Werewolves gather for hunts during the full moon with zero concern of being caught, despite being in an area where recreational hunting appears to be legal (and thus, where the appearance and disappearance of a large pack of wolves that fluctuates with the lunar cycle should really raise eyebrows). Multiple people know or suspect that Luna is a werewolf despite her actively hiding it.
So does everyone just … keep it a secret? I know that denial and cynicism are immensely powerful forces, but this seems to be a secret that is only kept because none of the people whom it’s leaked to can be bothered to tell anyone else. Sure, it’s implied that witches are in hiding because of past persecution, but that then begs the question of who they (or anyone else) is hiding from in the present. Are we really meant to think that, in our modern era, there isn’t a faction of witches, werewolves, and other magical folk proudly sharing their identities with the world and demanding reparations for being forced to live in hiding for centuries?
Things get weirder when Bolin casually mentions that werewolves aren’t real. Now, Bolin is admittedly only a dabbler in magic, so maybe he just lacks adequate exposure to the magical world, but once magic is on the table, it’s a bit hard to accept that he’d casually rule out magical beings. There must be some reason within the magical world itself that supports this conclusion. If so, though, what are the rules for which parts of the world do or don’t believe in one another?
PROSE / EDITING
Way of the Wolf is a good reminder of why Buroker is the indie author I remembered fondly after all this time. Despite not being traditionally published, her work does have professional polish to it. I don’t know whether this is due to her beta-readers, her finding a good editor, Buroker being good about carefully rereading and proofreading her work, or some combination of the above, but evident care was taken to ensure everything fits together.
Now, the editing here isn’t perfect. There are a small number of repeated lines of exposition throughout the book. Some character motivations and conclusions also get bluntly stated (and repeated) even when there’s adequate context to do without them. These latter cases really do read like mistakes rather than a lack of subtlety on Buroker’s part.
In terms of the prose itself, it is very easy to read. If you’re not interested in the heavy prose often seen in Fantasy set in secondary or created worlds, this will likely be a good read for you. In contrast to The Empyrean, the very modern way of speaking and thinking about things makes sense, given that Luna actually does live in the United States in the modern day.
FINAL THOUGHT.S
I’m honestly glad that I decided to pick up a Buroker novel again. While her work may not appeal to everyone, she is an author who’s cracked the code of making fun, straightforward stories. It’s nice to change things up once in a while. If you are open to trying an indie author, I’d recommend giving Way of the Wolf and Buroker’s other novels (particularly the Fallen Empire series) a try.
OUT OF THE BOTTLE
As of the time of posting this, I have already finished Relics of the Wolf and started reading the third book, Kin of the Wolf. The review for Relics is complete, and it will release on June 13th. The review of Kin will need to wait a bit, as I have found myself swept up in reading The Queen of Vorn, a book that will almost certainly demand a multi-part review.
Next week, on June 6th, we will have our biweekly entry in the Onyx Storm series. This next post will only cover Chapter 12, and it will also serve as a spotlight on the overall dishonesty that Rebecca Yarros displays through her writing. In the course of this spotlight, we’ll be reviewing a worldbuilding element that somehow manages to destroy her entire series yet again, as well as the petty reason that appears to have been Yarros’s motivation for retconning that element into her story.
I’m also excited to note that we are just over a month away from July 1st, when Tales of the Five Worlds will premiere Part 1 of the 13-part novella “The Unbottled Idol”.
Mohsen Yavari's task within the Imperial Inquisition was simple: monitor the gods' activities in the mortal world. When a diplomat is killed by a goddess, a maverick inquisitor recruits him for her investigation. Their search for answers will lay bare sinister truths, with a child’s soul hanging in the balance.
Thank you all for being here this week. Please remember to subscribe to the newsletter if you’d like a weekly e-mail with links to all the latest posts. Have a great weekend, everyone, and I hope to see you again soon.
