mothumn's reviews
377 reviews

Wildwood is classic type of adventurous tale of children wandering into a secret magical world; talking animals, evil queens, and sentient plants all included. It has the whimsy of Narnia and the quirkiness of Over the Garden Wall, so you’d think I would enjoy it. And yet it just sadly fell very flat for me.

Right off the bat I just had this sense that this author was just trying a bit to hard to make the books quirky. From the writing style to the characters, it just didn’t feel natural. Prue, the protagonist is twelve years old and it was apparently necessary to write in that she was browsing the record shop, at twelve years old? I guess the context of this book having been published in 2011 and takes place in Portland, and is actually written by a member of an indie folk band is a bit of an explanation, it’s the time of manic pixie dream girls and indie tumblr, and the rising hipster trend. Unfortunately I just found it annoying. And to add to that, both Prue and Curtis the other main character are just very incompetent and careless. And look I get they are children, but their carelessness literally cost lives in this. They luckily weren’t so annoying to the point that I couldn’t go on, mostly because when they weren’t annoying me I just found them a bit boring.

My main problem with this book is that is so long, it is over 500 pages and it does not at all warrant that length. The first bit of the book was very drawn out and then when I finally finished the book, looking back that whole chunk of about 200 pages was pretty much inconsequential to the actual conflict of the book. It just seemed like it was there to up the page count, which is absolutely did not need to do. There were a lot of side quest type of scenes, random conversations about nothing, and trivial descriptions (there was literally a paragraph that described the naturalness of a cave, how it was clearly not manmade(it was a cave thats pretty much a given??)). It ended up just making the story feel super drawn out, it took me two months to read, and by the last 200 pages I was really just ready to wrap it up. I think this book would have benefited from some serious editing, cutting out unnecessary scenes and dialogues. I think if this book was about 150 pages shorter (which it could easily do and still make sense) I wouldn’t have been so worn out by this book and could have actually enjoyed my time with it.

I think that maybe this is the type of middle grade book that is more enjoyable if you are the target audience. I don’t rescind my criticisms, but I do think that were I to have read this when it came out, I would have been 9, I could have enjoyed this more. I think that children still deserve books that and media that is well written, but I think my issues here are ones that wouldn’t be too big of a deal to a child, I might just be a bit too easily annoyed. So, while it might not be the first book I’d recommend for someone in this target demographic, I wouldn’t not recommend it. There are some scenes that are quite dark, but I wouldn’t say any darker than other middlegrade books I’ve read, Percy Jackson for example gets pretty dark in it’s subject matter. There’s a pretty flippant response to death in this, both towards the ‘bad guys’ and their own people which was kind of weird tbh but I don’t know.

And yet despite all my complaints, I think that there is actually a good story hidden within here. I originally picked this up because I had heard Laika studios was developing it into their next movie. I’m a big fan of Laika studios and this does honestly just feel like the perfect book for them to adapt, which is weird to say considering I just complained about. But I said it had the whimsy of Narnia and the quirkiness of Over the Garden Wall, and I meant that as a compliment. I trust Laika studios to be able to adjust it to work and not be so annoying to me. So this might (hopefully) be one of those instances where the movie is actually better than the book.

I feel kind of bad not enjoying Wildwood, I’m actually a bit of a fan of Colin Meloy’s band the Decemberists, and I enjoyed the illustrations, so there’s a positive outcome, but I unfortunately couldn’t bring myself to like it very much. Actually though, speaking of the illustrations, this is more of an issue with the publishing process, but some of the full page illustrations seemed to be inserted into the book in weird spots, they’d be like a couple pages before or after the scene they were depicting, often after the POV and everything had switched? So that was a bit confusing, but they were really nice!

spoiler below but I need to get this off my chest

In the very end, Curtis just decided to not go home?? So his family is just left thinking he died/ran away?? That is is so fucked up what the hell also like he’s like 12 surely if he went missing randomly there would be some kind of police investigation or something? Think about your family Curtis