| Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book 1 |
|
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Colin Meloy |
| Illustrator | Carson Ellis |
| Cover artist | Carson Ellis |
| Country | US |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Wildwood Chronicles |
| Genre(s) | Children's literature |
| Publisher | Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins) |
| Publication date | August 30, 2011 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback tr. bdg. acid-free paper) |
| Pages | 541 (hardback 1st edition) |
| ISBN | 978-0-06-202468-8 |
| OCLC Number | 703205798 |
Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book 1 is a children's fantasy novel for ages 9 and up by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis. The book combines real locations in Portland, Oregon with fantastic elements like talking animals and witchcraft, inspired by classic fantasy tales and folklore. The natural beauty and culture of Portland feature prominently. It is the first in a planned series of at least three books, to be written while Meloy's work with The Decemberists is on hiatus.
Wildwood received positive reviews as an engrossing story appropriate for its target age, and was especially praised for Ellis's illustrations, and the old-fashioned book design. A few critics complained of a plot that sometimes dragged, the cloying use of local color, and violence that could be inappropriate for some readers.
Contents |
Wildwood tells the story of how middle schoolers Prue McKeel and Curtis Mehlberg rescue Prue's baby brother, Mac, who was carried off to the Impassible Wilderness by a murder of crows. In the course of the story, Prue and Curtis discover that the magically protected Impassible Wilderness is populated by humans and anthropomorphic animals who speak and use tools. The humans and animals form a number of contentious nations and factions, weaving a web of shifting political alliances and rivalries. Prue and Curtis become entangled in the intrigue and wars of the Wood, and learn their true nature as "half-breeds", having a mystical connection to the Wood that allows them to pass through the Woods Magic barrier, the Periphery Bind, that keeps the Outsiders, or ordinary people of Portland, out.[1]
The setting of the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland and the Impassible Wilderness, based on the real life Forest Park, is vital to Wildwood.[2] Meloy said, "I really do think the main character of the book is Wildwood and its different provinces."[3]
Forest Park is about 8 miles (13 km) long and 1 mile (1.6 km) wide, containing 5,100 acres (2,100 ha) of natural woods, mostly second growth forest with some old growth, all within the city limits of Portland.[4] Nearly every location in the book is inspired by a real life place.[5] Meloy and Ellis live on the edge of the park, and frequently hike the many trails finding inspiration for geography of the series.[5][6] A large map of the Wood, consisting of the countries of North Wood and South Wood with the Avian Principality and the untamed Wildwood in between, covers the book's endpapers, and detail maps are included in the sections inside.[1] The maps, mirroring Forest Park but with fantastical alterations, were drawn before the plot or any characters of Wildwood were created, and the story was built up around the imagined geography.[3][5] Ellis noted there are a number of stunningly large trees that served as the model for the North Wood Council Tree.[5]
Because the St. Johns Bridge does not normally exist, except by casting a spell with runes, in the fictional parallel universe of the book, the only direct access Prue and Curtis have to pursue the crows into the Impassible Wilderness is a risky dash over the Railroad Bridge, on the train tracks since there is no footpath.[1]:33–40, 331–340, 346–349, plate 4 Though the Ghost Bridge could be interpreted as an apparition of a bridge that existed in the past, that is, the real St. Johns Bridge, implying that Wildwood takes place in the future, Meloy said this is not the case, and that he has "another story in mind" as to the origin of the Ghost Bridge, and that Wildwood is meant to be more or less contemporary.[5] Pittock Mansion appears under its real name, but serves as the seat of government of South Wood, while the Oregon Zoo is the South Wood Prison. The Audubon Society of Portland is the approximate location of the Avian Principality.[5]
The character of contemporary Portland, or at least a popular stereotype of Portland's youth culture, is expressed in Prue and Curtis, and Prue's parents. The kids are "bespectacled, bike-riding, vinyl-browsing, Kurosawa-referencing children."[7] Loving descriptions of real elements of Portland are combined to create a "richly satisfying weave of reality and fantasy."[8]
The first human Prue meets in the Wood is an old man driving a mail truck, Richard, the South Wood Postmaster General. She sees in him something she, "couldn't put her finger on that seemed to exude from him, something that made him seem like no one she'd ever met before. It was a kind of aura or shine, like the way a familiar landscape is transformed in the light of a full moon." The natives of the Wood are consistently able to recognize Prue and Curtis as Outsiders, who ought not to be able to enter through the Periphery Bind surrounding the Wood, while only the people of the pastoral and meditative North Wood can also see that Prue and Curtis have a dual nature as "half-breeds", both of Outsiders and of the Wood, unhindered by the magical barrier. There are no specifics given on the mechanics of this sense.[1]
"Mother," Prue had said, now pouring rice milk over her cereal, "I told you. I’m a vegetarian. Ergo: no bacon. She had read that word, ergo, in a novel she’d been reading. That was the first time she had used it. She wasn’t sure if she’d used it right, but it felt good.
Prue McKeel, age 12, is from the beginning of Wildwood to the end, decisive, determined, and courageous,[10] finding inspiration in Nancy Drew in her effort to rescue her brother, and along the way, save Curtis and the Wood itself. Unlike Curtis, she is not cowed by anyone, standing up to Lars Svik the Governor-Regent of South Wood,[1]:123–130 Crown Prince Owl Rex of the Avian Principality, and even the fearsome Alexandra, the Dowager Governess, as well as her parents. She is a precocious seventh grader with a talent for nature drawing, an encyclopedic knowledge of birds, having kept The Sibley Guide to Birds overdue from the library for three months, and takes Honors English with her classmate Curtis. Like her parents, and Curtis, Prue is "very-Portland", with stereotypical interests like yoga, vegetarianism, and single-speed bicycles, which she repairs and tunes herself.[1]:42, 337[3][11] Because Prue's birth came about by Alexandra using witchcraft to overcome Prue's parents' difficulty conceiving a child, she shares some essence of the Wood, along with being an Outsider, which is what made it possible for her to cross the magical barrier that protects the Wood.[1]:331–340 Meloy said that Prue is a composite character, "partly Carson as a kid," with her "inner world" coming from Ellis's childhood.[12][13] She is also based on the neice of a friend, a girl with, "an amazing independent streak that we’ve always admired."[13]
A voice, a woman's voice, sounded from above them. "And that's why we're here, dear Curtis."
Curtis looked up and saw Alexandra, the Dowager Governess, astride a jet-black horse, emerge from over a hillock between two massive cedars. She extended a willowy hand. "Come," she said to him, "I'll show you the world."
Curtis Mehlberg is 11 and a seventh grade classmate of Prue's, though not her close friend at the beginning of Wildwood. In the past Prue and Curtis shared an interest in drawing superhero fan art, but Prue has moved on to botanical illustration, leaving Curtis and his love of comic books behind. He is an awkward "persecuted loner" who lacks Prue's confidence,[10] and is, at first, easily intimidated and manipulated by Prue, Alexandra, and others. He grows in the course of the book, gaining a more definite sense of who he is after being forced to choose sides and stand up to the Dowager Governess Alexandra. His relationship with Alexandra recalls the seduction of Edmund Pevensie by the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.[2] After being hustled into an ill-fitting role as an officer in the coyote army, he inadvertently distinguishes himself in battle. Later, by free choice, he becomes a full member of the bandits, and decides to stay behind with them in Wildwood, even as Prue returns home to St. Johns. Like Prue, Curtis is a "half-breed" who has a dual nature that allows him to enter the Wood, but the exact nature of this connection not revealed in Wildwood, other than Curtis speculating that he has a strange reclusive aunt, and a number of odd relatives.[1]
Curtis's choice to stay in Wildwood leaves behind a grieving family in Portland. Meloy said that reading fantasy stories growing up, about, "kids going to other worlds or crossing over to another place, it would invariably involve them coming back at the end," and, "Whenever that character made a choice to come back, it didn't feel true to me for some reason." So Meloy wanted to experiment with a character who did what Meloy himself wanted to do, even though he had a happy childhood and loving family, and stay behind and get "sucked into that world" completely.[5] Meloy said, "Curtis I relate to… I think of Curtis as being a version of myself," reflecting that as a child he, "desperately longed to be taken away to another world."[5][12][13]
The exiled Dowager Governess of South Wood, Alexandra, is the main antagonist of Wildwood. She leads an army of coyotes she gathered from the ill-governed scavenging coyote population of Wildwood. She was deposed from South Wood and sent into Wildwood, expected to die there, after it was discovered she had created by magic an automaton to replace her dead son. The death of their child had driven Alexandra's husband, the Governor-Regent Grigor Svik, to his death bed, and Alexandra to extremes in her grief. The action of Wildwood is driven by her plot to take revenge on everyone and everything in the Wood, in which she intends to use Prue's brother Mac as a blood sacrifice in a spell to control the Wood's ivy, which will then grow out of control and consume every living thing in the Wood.[1] The real Forest Park is under continual threat from invasive English ivy (Hedera helix) which has the potential to create an "ivy desert" monoculture, like the magical ivy apocalypse that Alexandra plotted.[14]
HarperCollins said Wildwood is for ages 9 and up, and most critics call it a children's novel,[15] or middle grade book,[16] but some critics class it as young-adult fiction (YA or YAL).[8][11][17] Simultaneously, the book is being marketed at adults, both Decemberists fans and adult fans of children's and young adult literature.[3] Meloy said the book's 541 page length was comparable to many of the books he enjoyed at Wildwood's target age, and Ellis noted that, "a 10 year old kid can be a voracious reader."[18]
Wildwood echoes several classic fantasy and children's tales, notably J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.[10][19][20] The kidnapping of a child by crows comes from Irish folktales of the Sluagh, and from Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There where a girl rescues her brother kidnapped by goblins.[3][10] The literary tone of Decemberists songs is apparent in the writing style, with a weakness for the charms of archaic language, and a bookish middle-schooler's love of stretching her vocabulary with "50 cent words".[3][10][11] The folklore roots of the band's songs, love of nature, and romanticized historical periods are apparent in Wildwood as well. Carson Ellis's illustrations, ever present on Decemberists album covers, are consistent with that tone, having a dark and playfully macabre tone reminiscent of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl.[3][6][10]
The factions of the Wood use a variety of technologies from the past, including cutlasses, blunderbusses, flintlocks, and vehicles like trucks and trains. No attempt was made to maintain a consistent level of technological advancement or justify why a particular device was used; rather, Meloy said they could, "pick coolest version of whatever piece of technology" they wanted. Ellis added that there was, "no rule to it. Basically we just picked whatever we liked."[5] The book stays focused on the drama of the events without getting caught up in precise technical details. Though the text pointedly mentions Prue's single-speed bicycle,[1]:3 de rigueur for a true contemporary Portlander, the illustrations twice show her bike having derailleur gears, which are only present on multi-speed bikes.[1]:23, 431 When she first meets the South Wood postman Richard, he threatens her with a shotgun, which in the same paragraph is referred to a double-barrelled rifle, then on the next page it is called a shotgun again.[1]:62–63
Carson Ellis said that her favorite drawing among Wildwood's 85 illustrations is of a badger pulling a rickshaw, a relatively minor illustration compared with the full page color plates depicting pivotal scenes that grace the book. Meloy said that the scene it illustrated, of a friendly animal who appears at an opportune moment to offer Prue a ride after she escaped from captivity in the Pittock Mansion, was not vital to the plot, and an editor wanted to cut it from the book. But Meloy had written it specifically because he thought Ellis would enjoy drawing the badger and rickshaw, so he fought to keep it in.[5] Booklist's Daniel Kraus highlighted the image as representative of the book, commenting, "If you like stories in which spunky kids emerge from secret tunnels only to be greeted by smartly outfitted badgers operating rickshaws, this is your book."[21] Ellis commented, "That's one of the moments when the story seems really stream-of-consciousness. Prue pops up out of a manhole, and a badger comes by with a rickshaw and gives her a ride free of charge, and it's like, why not? It's such a great image."[1]:173[22]
The book was first conceived by Meloy and Ellis before The Decemberists were formed, when they first moved to Portland and were living in a warehouse where they, "had this idea of working on a novel together … because we enjoyed making up stories and playing off one another's creative impulses."[10] Meloy cites Tolkien, and Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain books that he read growing up as important influences, along with Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, from which, "that idea of a world within the real world and the implausibility of the whole enterprise was a direct influence."[5][13] Ellis said her favorite books growing up were The Chronicles of Narnia, and that later as an illustrator the numerous illustrations in the seven books of that series were a direct inspiration.[5] Unlike the other half dozen books Ellis has illustrated, where the text is completed before the illustrator was called in, she collaborated with Meloy throughout the writing.[3]
After writing the first 80 pages, Meloy put book on hold for several years while they worked, respectively, on Meloy's music and Ellis's book illustration. When work resumed on the novel, the title changed from How Ruthie Ended the War to Wildwood, Ruthie became Prue, and the object of her quest changed from her lost father to her kidnapped brother.[10] The early version of the story was also, "wildly inappropriate for children."[3][5] Once they resumed work on the novel, Ellis said it took about two years to complete.[5] Meloy said he feared his entry into fiction writing would be seen as "dabbling", wanting to avoid creating a "vanity project" like Madonna's picture books.[6] Five publishers sought the rights to the Wildwood series before being won by the HarperCollins imprint Balzer + Bray, with a first print run of 250,000 copies.[6]
Meloy has said The Decemberists will be on hiatus and not releasing another album for a few years, as he intends to write at least two more books for the Wildwood Chronicles.[6][10] Meloy said the second Wildwood novel will have Prue returning to the Wood, "her life very much in danger", in a plot involving "scheming industrialists trying to worm their way into Wood" from the Outside. Meloy also revealed that the next book will show a much "weirder Portland", and the supernatural will not be confined to the Wood, and that he decided he would no longer constrain the denizens of the Wood to the native species of Forest Park.[5]
Wildwood was on The New York Times Best Seller Children's Chapter Books list for two weeks, ranking 7th the first week and 9th the second.[23]
Critics' reactions to Wildwood were positive overall. Most reviewers noted some faults, but no major publication gave a negative review. Critics universally praised the quality of the illustrations, and the overall charm of the book, made in old-fashioned style with maps on the end papers and a select set of color plates.[2][7][11][24] The A.V. Club's Tasha Robinson found the book, in spite of its flaws, "a perfect balance of middle-school-age-appropriate simplicity and more challenging writing that makes the book adult-accessible."[2] Meloy's rich descriptive language, of action, and especially the natural setting, were among the book's strengths, while a lack of character development and over-reliance on familiar fantasy tropes were cited as weaknesses.[2] Similarly, The New Yorker found that the use of familiar motifs could sometimes be "formulaic" but it was nonetheless a well told tale that was, "never condescending", and that Meloy's original contribution to conventions of the genre was his allegorical exploration of contemporary political and military struggle, including diplomacy, revolution, and ethnic cleansing.[24]
The most frequent criticism was that the pace dragged in some places,[11] though this was excused by some critics as necessary setup for subsequent novels in the series.[8] Some critics complained of being "rankled" at the "arch" and "Portland-y" mention such local lifestyle tropes as cork flooring and recycling bins.[11] Prue's riding to the final battle on her bicycle caused The New York Times's Claire Dederer to quip, "bicycle heroism: it doesn't get any more Portland than that."[8] The regionalisms came on strong enough to bring to some critics' minds the Portlandia TV series that pokes fun at the oddities of Portland culture.[8][11]
Rachel Brown of The Atlantic thought that, "it makes perfect sense that Colin Meloy, the loquacious and imaginative lead singer of the quirky Portland-based rock band The Decemberists, would write a children's book."[3] In contrast, The Stranger's critic Anna Minard feared that Wildwood could be one more of a stream of "baldly mediocre books written by celebrities", citing the trend of children's books by Joy Behar, Jerry Seinfeld, Jimmy Fallon, Gloria Estefan, and Madonna as justification.[7] Coincidentally, Colin Meloy's sister, novelist Maile Meloy, also released a juvenile fiction book in 2011, saying, "I feel like everyone I know is writing one."[6] Minard also worried that the book would pander to adult Decemberists fans, while only, "dressed trendily in kid-friendly wrapping," but was pleasantly astonished that the book did none of these things, and was not a "vanity project", landing well in range of its middle reader target and avoiding the affected pitfalls of a pop musician as writer.[7]
Some critics warned that Wildwood might be too violent for some readers, having many of the horrors so frequently found in Decemberists songs, including battles when people and animals die by musket and cannon fire, sword blows, and falling, and references to torture, and the threat of the blood sacrifice of a baby at the book's climax.[6]
Animation studio Laika announced that they optioned Wildwood for a stop motion feature film.[6][25] Laika produced the trailer for the book.[17]