Book Review #37 - Tell The Wolves I'm Home

Tell The Wolves I'm Home surprised me.  When a book is listed as young adult fiction and the blurb from Goodreads begins with,  "In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost someone until you’ve found them,"    I expected something a little more Hallmark-esque.  A little more feel-goody.  But this is about AIDS during the 80s when nobody was sure how it was spread and if you could catch it by sharing Chapstick or not.  This is about prejudice and jealousy and revenge and deception and death.  And just like the title implies, this is about facing down something that could easily destroy a person.

The title is beautiful.  It's nuanced and unique and has both symbolic meaning as well as being referenced several times in the story.  The book centers around a fourteen year-old misfit, June, who by any teenage standard is considered weird and whose only after school activity involves donning gunnie-sax dresses and lace-up suede boots while walking around the school woods pretending she lives in medieval times.  Her older sister, Greta, is a golden child.  So smart she skipped a grade.  So talented she's being offered Broadway roles.  June is consistently labeled "average" by both teachers and her parents so she revels in the adoration and attention from her uncle Finn and is left devastated by his AIDS related death.  After she discovers that important facts about Finn's life were kept from her, including his boyfriend,Toby, who is blamed by her entire family for Finn's death, she chooses to step out of her comfortable fantasy world and with much confusion and ignorance, begins to see a complicated but not awful reality.

There are several toe-the-line YA rules that are followed.  June's parents are absent throughout the book (they are both accountants and most of the story takes place between January and April - tax time) as well as clueless, condescending and wrong.  That is not my favorite thing in a book.  Also, at 14, June seems entirely too free to engage in extremely high risk behavior including meeting a stranger by train, frequently hanging out without permission or notice in New York City, smoking cigarettes and consuming alcohol.  But it all sounds worse than it is.  I feel bad writing that, as if those things aren't big deals, but in this particular story, they aren't the main deal.  They are byproducts of her grief and not a glamorous portrayal of teenagehood. In actuality, this is a story of naivety and innocence and grief and friendship and love. The author makes a point to differentiate between ways of being romantic.  Through her character, Finn, she defends the romantics by defining them as optimists and I like that.  I'm not sure how believable the story is at times.  Lots of times, I thought it was weird, independent of June's own weirdness.  Greta seems contradictory as a character and the pacing is often irritating in its repetitiveness but by the book's end, I felt Brunt justified her writing.  With art and symbolism framing its message of beauty and acceptance, Tell The Wolves I'm Home isn't a perfect book but it's a good one.