Today, I want to tell you about Wildwood, by Colin Meloy.
Prue lives in Portland, right on the edge of the Impassable Wilderness. She has an ordinary life, ordinary parents, an ordinary baby brother. Until, one day at the park, Prue's brother is kidnapped by a murder of crows and taken to the Impassable Wilderness. Now, Prue has to get her brother back,
and a bothersome classmate, Curtis, keeps trying to help her. Once they are in the Impassable Wilderness, though, they discover it's not impassable at all. Creatures of all types live in North Wood or South Wood, many birds live in the Avian Principality, and the stretch in between, an untamed, dangerous place, is called Wildwood.
I gave this book three stars.
Pros:
Setting
All of the different areas in the Impassable Wilderness are so different, yet extremely believable, and the setting/scenery is incredibly rich. Also, talking animals is somehow magical.
Commentary
Meloy was trying to comment on some issues, one of them being that individuals' concerns often aren't heard in large governments, and I think this had the ability to be done very well.
Promise
So many things were promising about this book. The story was there, the commentary was there, it just needed more work.
Cons:
Characters
Although I liked Prue, at first she was quite mean. We didn't know why she was mean, she just was. She did become nicer by the end of the book, but it would've been nice if she was more rounded and had more of a character arc and motivations.
It Needed More Work.
I loved the idea, the story, the commentary was great, the setting was great, everything had tons of promise. But the pacing was off, the sentences were all structured pretty much the same, things weren't described in an engaging way. . . Like I said, it needed more work.
The story has so much potential, but it makes me sad to see this as the published copy. I'm not trying to be mean; I just think this book would easily be one of my absolute favorites with a little more work.
Have you read Wildwood? What do you think of it?
Spruce Nogard
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