Review: Tell The Wolves I'm Home (Carol Rifka Brunt)

I was sucked in by the title and the cover. It’s graphic and lovely and weird and yes, I judged a book by its cover. But after I’d read the synopsis, Brunt’s novel already had three strikes against it:

1. The narrator is a teenage girl. I do not like teenage narrators mainly because I do not like teenagers. They are, with a few exceptions, petulant and uninteresting creatures.

2. It is nostalgically set in the 1980s, a time I feel is far too recent for nostalgia.

3. It’s about dying and grief and AIDS and I’m tired of the literature of dying.

True to my expectations, the novel was overall disappointing.

1. Teenage Narrator Problem... Brunt required far too much suspension of disbelief from the reader; no fourteen or sixteen girl is that selfless and magnanimous. Both the narrator and her sister displayed unrealistic levels of insight and compassion to their own and others’ circumstances. They were gawky Buddhas in teenage bodies and it made the text feel forced and unrealistic. If she had written the story from the perspective of a reflective adult narrator recalling a story, this would have worked.

2. Nostalgia for the 1980s... It wasn’t as bad as I had expected. If anything, it felt more distracting than anything else. It was contextually necessary to set the novel in the 1980s but references to 80s music and fashion drew the reader’s attention away from the seriousness of the situation and leant it a kitsch that was inappropriate.

3. Death and Dying... I was pleasantly surprised. This was the one area the narrator seemed to be a fully developed character. The stigma of AIDS in the 1980s was handled with compassion and respect and illustrated beautifully how far we’ve come (which, sadly, isn’t that far)  in our understanding of the disease and our treatment of people living with AIDS.

Despite all of this, I liked the novel. Truly. There was something about the narrator and her family that was authentic in that beautifully fucked-up way “healthy” families have. Everyone loves each other but they are all essentially and profoundly alone in struggling with their own problems. Brunt’s construction of the family dynamic was brilliantly subtle and that for me that raised the book from mediocre and disappointing to “surprisingly pretty good.”

Plus, the cover and the title. Really. Take a look, it’s lovely.