Fiona
Wood’s 2013 novel ‘Wildlife’ was recently awarded the Children’s
Book Council of Australia ‘Book of the Year’. It is a nicely crafted YA novel, narrated in
first person from the perspective of two characters, sixteen year old Sibylla
and Lou. Both girls attend Crowthorne Grammar, and both are about to embark on
the school’s outdoor education camp for a whole term: an activity intended to
give the city kids a taste of roughing it in the wilderness and finding independence
away from parents and normal school routine. We begin the novel with the clever
and generally shy Sibylla being roped by her godmother into modeling for an
advertising campaign. She becomes the talk of the school and the action goes
from there as Sibylla is thrown headfirst into the ‘cool group’ and her first
romance with Ben, the school’s most popular guy. Sibylla is articulate and
grounded from her upbringing by her sensible doctor mother, but of course she
has all the usual worries of a sixteen year old: ‘My virginity does not feel
like some wondrous thing I will one day bestow on a lucky boy; it’s more in the
realm of something I need to get rid of, like braces, before my real life can
begin’.
Lou
is a more mysterious character, new to the school and regularly seeing the
school counselor. Lou has recently lost her boyfriend to a fatal bike accident,
and she’s looking for a fresh start, but still unwilling to ‘just forget’ the
deep love she had for her ‘Fred’. In the novel, she pens him letters and speaks
beautifully and honestly of her still raw grief:
‘But
in reality, I’m stuck Fred. Stuck at stage-three grief, or is it four? Hating
myself, and angry at you. Maybe there’s also a bit of five, or is it six, in
the mix? Depressions. But no sign yet
of six, or is it seven? Realisation. Testing
New Reality. No. Just missing you’.
Supporting
these protagonists is Sibylla’s best friend Holly who typifies the ‘frenemy’
figure; Sibylla’s childhood friend Michael, an unusual and clever boy; and Ben,
Mr Nice Guy on the surface but fairly one dimensional as a boyfriend. Wood
portrays the manipulative nature of Holly well, and she is a recognisable figure
to any female. Michael is a bit more clichéd as the ‘Asperger’s style’
outsider, but he has a nicely drawn arc towards the end of the novel.
Wood
explores more confronting issues than general in ‘Wildlife’ and I thought she
dealt with sexuality very well from a mature teenager’s perspective. Her
treatment of Lou also surpassed the cliché of the outsider, and I felt Lou’s
grief was realistic and empathetic.
The
language of ‘Wildlife’ is pitched well and is appropriately contemporary. Both
Lou and Sibylla are very likeable and both have a wry sense of humour when
describing the camp and their peers: ‘Our menstrual cycles are slowly
converging. Six starting-to-overlap waves of PMS is a lot to deal with under
one roof. God help us all when we’ve got PMS at the same time. We’ll have a
genre leap from ‘coming of age’ to ‘schlock horror’. Hide the knives. I can see
the crime-scene tape now’.
The
best moments of the novel are the scenes where the characters venture out for
their solitary overnight experience in the bush. The descriptions of their fear
felt in the threatening landscape but also their appreciation of its peaceful beauty
are lovely passages: ‘It was quiet but for my puffed breathing and a wheeling
spray of rosellas. I got up, legs trembling and started looking around. There
was a pond, and it was full of fresh water after all the rain…Black sun spots
burnt into the red of my closed eyelids when I blinked. I filled my hat with
water and put it back on.’ Other insights in the novel are references to
literature, ‘I mean, hats off to Shakespeare, her certainly lays it on the
line, talk about life lessons in the odd unhappy ending. It felt so theoretical
with Romeo and Juliet, though, didn’t it? And a bit silly. Kind of avoidable.
Too coincidental. So much swings on shitty timing. But, silly us, so much does
swing on shitty timing. If you’d left a bit earlier. If you’d left a bit later.
Stop it. Bite down. Stop biting.’ I thought the allusion to Iago with Holly’s
character was a great touch.
My
only concern with ‘Wildlife’ was that personally I found it hard at times to
differentiate between Lou and Sibylla’s voices, and they were perhaps a bit too
similar but that could just be my reading. I can certainly see why this novel
won the award: it’s entertaining, relatable and very perceptive.
*This review is part of the Australian Womens Writers Challenge 2014
*This review is part of the Australian Womens Writers Challenge 2014
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