![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
delphi✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: YA/Children's
Wildwood is a 2011 children's novel by Colin Meloy, also known for his work as frontman for the Decemberists, with illustrations by Carson Ellis. It follows the adventures of two pretty much contemporary American children, Prue and Curtis, as they set off into the woods to rescue Prue's baby brother (who was carried off by crows) and discover a secret civilization of people and talking animals who have lived in the Impassable Wilderness for centuries and are now locked in a brewing war for control over it.
Things that would have made me love this when I was a kid:
• The world-within-a-world element. A magical society living just outside a regular city? Hell, yeah.
• Rich and vivid language, with an appealing narrative voice.
• Its worldbuilding (although I'm going to put a pin in this), which generally walks a nice line between whimsy and grit, with rules that establish themselves with a light touch.
• The length. This is a brick by children's book standards. It's well-paced and the sort of a thing that could keep a voracious reader busy all the way to their next trip to the library.
• Its sensibility about the independence of kid protagonists in the real world.
• The nomadic society of bandits and their king.
• The illustrations, particularly the full-colour inserts.
This didn't quite hit for me as an adult, but I'm glad I finally checked it out after years of meaning to.
I think the main thing that kept me from really loving it was wanting a little more interiority for the main characters. I get that the book is aiming for more of a fairy tale and Narnia vibe, but: 1) some of the characters' important choices really do hinge on personal decisions and relationships, and 2) this is a 540-page book. Fairy tales aren't built to run for 500+ pages, and it's longer than the first two Narnia books put together. I found myself craving more depth and emotional weight, especially as it went on.
For example, Curtis decides that he wants to join the bandits and stay with them forever, and he specifically tells Prue that it's the first time he's ever felt like he belongs. We know from Prue's point of view that Curtis is unpopular at school, but despite spending a lot of time in Curtis's head, we don't really get his perspective about the aspects of his life that he wants to leave behind or how being with the bandits makes him feel—or even what he thinks of them as individuals.
That especially stood out because I think there was also bit of a gendered thing going on where there was more ease around Prue having a couple of more affectionate or tender moments with the bandit king despite not being as invested in that faction as Curtis. But overall, there were several places for both of them where a bit more human emotion to support the (many) plot beats would have deepened my investment and given the story more heft.
Getting back to that asterisk next to the worldbuilding, I also found the story's decisions about diversity (or the relative lack thereof) occasionally distracting. I get it. Portland's pretty white, by design, and was even more so fifteen years ago. There are really only two characters from the real world and their direct relatives, and it wouldn't necessarily land well to be like, "All the characters of colour in this story are people lost in time, living in the woods."
But at the same time, among the predominantly 19th and 20th century settler-coded residents of the woods, you get these moments of groups with Indigenous coding who are either talking animals or white people—with the stereotypical two stripes of war paint and feathers in hair showing up in a picture of the latter. The text takes pains to characterize this group as Celtic, but that raises its own questions when a reference is made that seems to place them there before that territory's colonization, positioning a "since time immemorial" Irish population in the Oregon wilderness.
I often found myself looking at the aesthetics and thinking about those musical festivals full of severed pieces of Indigenous, Roma, and Celtic cosplay and felt like the fantasy here might be coming from a similar place.
The overall whiteness (and straightness, for that matter) of the book kept standing out because it's such a long story with such a huge cast. I did quite like large swathes of this book, but I think the length worked against it because the text kept offering more without necessarily offering more, if that makes sense.
This is the first book in a trilogy, and I have no idea if the subsequent books address or change any of this. I'm not racing to pick up the next one, but I might flip through it at the library sometime to see what it's like.
kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: YA/Children'sWildwood is a 2011 children's novel by Colin Meloy, also known for his work as frontman for the Decemberists, with illustrations by Carson Ellis. It follows the adventures of two pretty much contemporary American children, Prue and Curtis, as they set off into the woods to rescue Prue's baby brother (who was carried off by crows) and discover a secret civilization of people and talking animals who have lived in the Impassable Wilderness for centuries and are now locked in a brewing war for control over it.
Things that would have made me love this when I was a kid:
• The world-within-a-world element. A magical society living just outside a regular city? Hell, yeah.
• Rich and vivid language, with an appealing narrative voice.
• Its worldbuilding (although I'm going to put a pin in this), which generally walks a nice line between whimsy and grit, with rules that establish themselves with a light touch.
• The length. This is a brick by children's book standards. It's well-paced and the sort of a thing that could keep a voracious reader busy all the way to their next trip to the library.
• Its sensibility about the independence of kid protagonists in the real world.
• The nomadic society of bandits and their king.
• The illustrations, particularly the full-colour inserts.
This didn't quite hit for me as an adult, but I'm glad I finally checked it out after years of meaning to.
I think the main thing that kept me from really loving it was wanting a little more interiority for the main characters. I get that the book is aiming for more of a fairy tale and Narnia vibe, but: 1) some of the characters' important choices really do hinge on personal decisions and relationships, and 2) this is a 540-page book. Fairy tales aren't built to run for 500+ pages, and it's longer than the first two Narnia books put together. I found myself craving more depth and emotional weight, especially as it went on.
For example, Curtis decides that he wants to join the bandits and stay with them forever, and he specifically tells Prue that it's the first time he's ever felt like he belongs. We know from Prue's point of view that Curtis is unpopular at school, but despite spending a lot of time in Curtis's head, we don't really get his perspective about the aspects of his life that he wants to leave behind or how being with the bandits makes him feel—or even what he thinks of them as individuals.
That especially stood out because I think there was also bit of a gendered thing going on where there was more ease around Prue having a couple of more affectionate or tender moments with the bandit king despite not being as invested in that faction as Curtis. But overall, there were several places for both of them where a bit more human emotion to support the (many) plot beats would have deepened my investment and given the story more heft.
Getting back to that asterisk next to the worldbuilding, I also found the story's decisions about diversity (or the relative lack thereof) occasionally distracting. I get it. Portland's pretty white, by design, and was even more so fifteen years ago. There are really only two characters from the real world and their direct relatives, and it wouldn't necessarily land well to be like, "All the characters of colour in this story are people lost in time, living in the woods."
But at the same time, among the predominantly 19th and 20th century settler-coded residents of the woods, you get these moments of groups with Indigenous coding who are either talking animals or white people—with the stereotypical two stripes of war paint and feathers in hair showing up in a picture of the latter. The text takes pains to characterize this group as Celtic, but that raises its own questions when a reference is made that seems to place them there before that territory's colonization, positioning a "since time immemorial" Irish population in the Oregon wilderness.
I often found myself looking at the aesthetics and thinking about those musical festivals full of severed pieces of Indigenous, Roma, and Celtic cosplay and felt like the fantasy here might be coming from a similar place.
The overall whiteness (and straightness, for that matter) of the book kept standing out because it's such a long story with such a huge cast. I did quite like large swathes of this book, but I think the length worked against it because the text kept offering more without necessarily offering more, if that makes sense.
This is the first book in a trilogy, and I have no idea if the subsequent books address or change any of this. I'm not racing to pick up the next one, but I might flip through it at the library sometime to see what it's like.
As long as Prue could remember, every map she had ever seen of Portland and the surrounding countryside had been blotted with a large, dark green patch in the center, stretching like a growth of moss from the northwest corner to the southwest, and labeled with the mysterious initials “I.W.” She hadn’t thought to ask about it until one night, before Mac was born, when she was sitting with her parents in the living room. Her dad had brought home a new atlas and they were lying in the recliner together, leafing through the pages and tracing their fingers over boundary lines and sounding out the exotic place names of far-flung countries. When they arrived at a map of Oregon, Prue pointed to the small, inset map of Portland on the page and asked the question that had always confounded her:
“What’s the I.W.?”
“Nothing, honey,” had been her father’s reply. He flipped back to the map of Russia they had been looking at moments before. With his finger, he traced a circle over the wide northeastern part of the country where the letters of the word Siberia obscured the map.
There were no city names here; no network of wandering yellow lines demarking highways and roads. Only vast puddles all shades of green and white and the occasional squiggly blue line linking the myriad remote lakes that peppered the landscape. “There are places in the world where people just don’t end up living. Maybe it’s too cold or there are too many trees or the mountains are too steep to climb. But whatever the reason, no one has thought to build a road there and without roads, there are no houses and without houses, no cities.” He flipped back to the map of Portland and tapped his finger against the spot where “I.W.” was written. “It stands for ‘Impassable Wilderness.’ And that’s just what it is.”
“Why doesn’t anyone live there?” asked Prue.
“All the reasons why no one lives up in those parts of Russia. When the settlers first came to the area and started to build Portland, no one wanted to build their houses there: The forest was too deep and the hills were too steep. And since there were no houses there, no one thought to build a road. And without roads and houses, the place just sort of stayed that way: empty of people. The place, over time, just became more overgrown and more inhospitable. And so,” he said, “it was named the Impassable Wilderness and everybody knew to steer clear.” Her father dismissively wiped his hand across the map and brought it up to gently pinch Prue’s chin between his thumb and finger. Bringing her face close to his, he said, “And I don’t ever, ever want you to go in there.” He playfully moved her head back and forth and smiled. “You hear me, kid?”
Prue made a face and yanked her chin free. “Yeah, I hear you.”
They both looked back at the atlas, and Prue laid her head against her father’s chest.
“I’m serious,” said her father. She could feel his chest tighten under her cheek.
So Prue knew not to go near this “Impassable Wilderness,” and she only once bothered her parents with questions about it again. But she couldn’t ignore it. While the downtown continued to sprout towering condominium buildings, and newly minted terra-cotta outlet malls bloomed beside the highway in the suburbs, it baffled Prue that such an impressive swath of land should go unclaimed, untouched, undeveloped, right on the edge of the city. And yet, no adult ever seemed to comment on it or mention it in conversation. It seemed to not even exist in most people’s minds.
The only place that the Impassable Wilderness would crop up was among the kids at Prue’s school, where she was a seventh grader. There was an apocryphal tale told by the older students about a man—so-and-so’s uncle, maybe—who had wandered into the I.W. by mistake and had disappeared for years and years. His family, over time, forgot about him and continued on with their lives until one day, out of the blue, he reappeared on their doorstep. He didn’t seem to have any memory of the intervening years, saying only that he’d been lost in the woods for a time and that he was terribly hungry. Prue had been suspicious of the story from her first hearing; the identity of this “man” seemed to change from telling to telling. It was someone’s father in one version, a wayward cousin in another. Also, the details shifted in each telling. A visiting high school kid told a group of Prue’s rapt classmates that the individual (in this version, the kid’s older brother) had returned from his weird sojourn in the Impassable Wilderness aged beyond belief, with a great white beard that stretched down to his tattered shoes.
Regardless of the questionable truth of these stories, it became clear to Prue that most of her classmates had had similar conversations with their parents as she had had with her father. The subject of the Wilderness filtered into their play surreptitiously: What once was a lake of poisonous lava around the four-square court was now the Impassable Wilderness, and woe betide anyone who missed a bounce and was forced to scurry after the red rubber ball into those wilds. In games of tag, you were no longer tagged It, but rather designated the Wild Coyote of the I.W., and it was your job to scamper around after your fleeing classmates, barking and growling.
It was the specter of these coyotes that made Prue ask her parents a second time about the Impassable Wilderness. She had been awakened one night in a fright by the unmistakable sound of baying dogs. Sitting up in bed, she could hear that Mac, then four months old, had awoken as well and was being quietly shushed by their parents as he wailed and whimpered in the next room. The dogs’ baying was a distant echo, but it was bone-shivering nonetheless. It was a tuneless melody of violence and chaos and as it grew, more dogs in the neighborhood took up the cry. Prue noticed then that the distant barking was different from the barking of the neighborhood dogs; it was more shrill, more disordered and angry. She threw her blanket aside and walked into her parents’ room. The scene was eerie: Mac had quieted a little at this point, and he was being rocked in his mother’s arms while their parents stood at the window, staring unblinking out over the town at the distant western horizon, their faces pale and frightened.
“What’s that sound?” asked Prue, walking to the side of her parents. The lights of St. Johns spread out before them, an array of flickering stars that stopped at the river and dissolved into blackness.
Her parents started when she spoke, and her father said, “Just some old dogs howling.”
“But farther away?” asked Prue. “That doesn’t sound like dogs.”
Prue saw her parents share a glance, and her mother said, “In the woods, darling, there are some pretty wild animals. That’s probably a pack of coyotes, wishing they could tear into someone’s garbage somewhere. Best not to worry about it.” She smiled.
The baying eventually stopped and the neighborhood dogs calmed, and Prue’s parents walked her back into her room and tucked her into bed. That had been the last time the Impassable Wilderness had come up, but it hadn’t put Prue’s curiosity to rest. She couldn’t help feeling a little troubled; her parents, normally two founts of strength and confidence, seemed strangely shaken by the noises. They seemed as leery of the place as Prue was.
And so one can imagine Prue’s horror when she witnessed the black plume of crows disappear, her baby brother in tow, into the darkness of this Impassable Wilderness.