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I was finishing up Live on the Air when I found this at my local library and picked it up pretty much on a whim. I'm so glad I did.
Tell the Wolves I'm Home is a literary novel that could be sold as Young Adult if someone at a publishing house didn't decide 'literary' would likely make them more money. (For the record, that's because it's a 'coming of age' book, reads beautifully, and isn't explicitly 'adult,' not a knock on the book.)
June is fourteen and would rather live in a world of her imagination, or maybe the Middle Ages, than the boring neighborhood she's stuck in, with two accountant parents and an older sister who seems more like a stranger every year. When her beloved uncle Finn dies of AIDS, she ends up connecting with the only person who misses Finn as much as she does; his boyfriend, Toby, who starts as a mysterious stranger but who quickly becomes a vital part of June's life.
The book is set in 1987, and I found myself remembering the raw nastiness of the late 80s. I was too young and in too isolated a part of the world for the worst of it to reach me, but I still remember the fear and bigotry and sheer stupid cruelty of it, and this book doesn't gloss it over. For all that - and for all the sorrow - Tell the Wolves I'm Home is tremendously alive, and it glows with the power of love, the strength that people have to keep loving, no matter what might come next.
You'll cry, but you'll feel good about it.
Tell the Wolves I'm Home on Amazon
Tell the Wolves I'm Home is a literary novel that could be sold as Young Adult if someone at a publishing house didn't decide 'literary' would likely make them more money. (For the record, that's because it's a 'coming of age' book, reads beautifully, and isn't explicitly 'adult,' not a knock on the book.)
June is fourteen and would rather live in a world of her imagination, or maybe the Middle Ages, than the boring neighborhood she's stuck in, with two accountant parents and an older sister who seems more like a stranger every year. When her beloved uncle Finn dies of AIDS, she ends up connecting with the only person who misses Finn as much as she does; his boyfriend, Toby, who starts as a mysterious stranger but who quickly becomes a vital part of June's life.
The book is set in 1987, and I found myself remembering the raw nastiness of the late 80s. I was too young and in too isolated a part of the world for the worst of it to reach me, but I still remember the fear and bigotry and sheer stupid cruelty of it, and this book doesn't gloss it over. For all that - and for all the sorrow - Tell the Wolves I'm Home is tremendously alive, and it glows with the power of love, the strength that people have to keep loving, no matter what might come next.
You'll cry, but you'll feel good about it.
Tell the Wolves I'm Home on Amazon
