cedar_grove | Another Excellent Children's Book.

Fin-Kedinn sighed. "All you need to know is that there was a great fire, and the Soul-Eaters were scattered. Some were badly wounded. All went into hiding. We thought the threat had gone forever. We were wrong." Fin-Kedinn to Torak in Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver.

From Amazon book review:

From extensive research about how the people of Northern Europe may have lived more than six thousand years ago, Michelle Paver has fashioned a remarkable debut novel for children. Wolf Brother, the first instalment of her six-book Chronicles of Ancient Darkness sequence, takes its readers back in time to an atmospheric world of snow, hunter-gatherers, tribes, clans, mountains, forests, bears and unearthly superstitions. For humans then, life was hard and Paver’s narrative taps wonderfully into all the sensations they must have experienced living amidst such an unforgiving landscape.

I read this book to my children. It's perhaps the only time I saw them sit, enthralled, without a sound, just begging me to go on when I had to stop. The book is /very/ atmospheric, even creepy in places. It follows many of the conventions of the mythical quest adventure and truly is very difficult to put down. Meant for readers age 10 and older it's an excellent introduction to the series. If I had to have any one criticism it's that Torak can, at times, come across as somewhat whiney... but if you can get past that and not let it bother you, you feel for Torak and his 'wolf brother' (called wolf) whom he adopts and is adopted by at the beginning of the book. The end had me in tears - not that it takes much to do that - not that it was a sad ending, just one of those bittersweet ones. Will I get the second book? Perhaps so, but without anyone to read it to, I'd have to keep it to myself.