Book Of The Month: Tell The Wolves I’m Home
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Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a unique and compassionate story set during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the eighties in New York City. This backdrop is rarely featured in popular literary culture; from the start, Tell the Wolves I’m Home offers an individual story. Readers are provided with a rare insight to this time period, this disease, and the combined challenges these two elements created.
Tell the Wolves I’m Home
Originally Published: 2012
Pages: 367
Available on: Kindle, Audiobook, Paperback
GET YOUR COPY HERE
The fictional novel is written from the perspective of fourteen year old June Elbus, whose beloved Uncle Finn contracts AIDS, slowly and painfully succumbing to the disease. Her uncle is both godfather and best friend to June, and his death shakes the young girl’s world; the aftermath of this traumatizing loss and the unusual circumstances of Finn’s death reverberates throughout June’s entire family, both bonding and disconnecting them.
More than just focusing on the death of June’s uncle, Tell the Wolves I’m Home dives deeply into an unexpected friendship between the teenager and her late uncle’s partner, Toby. Bonding through their mutual grief, June secretly embarks on this new friendship, forbidden by her mother, to understand a side of her adored uncle that she never knew before. She both resents Toby’s closeness to her Uncle Finn with jealousy and craves to understand him better through this new contact, and as their bond develops, June’s relationship with her older sister, Greta, becomes strained. Initially, June seems faced with the necessity to choose between the two. The novel thematically explores loss, the grieving process within a family setting, and the importance of familial support and love. A death changes, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better, relationships among the living.
Shunned and ignored by June’s parents, Toby reaches out to June quietly to make good a promise he made to her uncle to watch over the girl. Together, they reminisce and June slowly releases her resentment as she grows to know Toby. They catch trains in New York City and go on everyday adventures in an attempt at normalcy, though everything about their relationship is a far cry from June’s previous normal. One of the most interesting dynamics of the novel is between Greta and June, as they alternatively push and pull, isolate themselves and then hesitantly reach out to one another to close the gap, only to regret it and snap back in an argument. It is easy to forget, as adults, the complexity of young sibling’s relationships, and the story reminds us how deeply adolescent thought and emotion run, but often are not able to find adequate outlet or expression.
June is a hugely sympathetic character, her teenager’s conscience, desires, and voice cleverly captured by author Carol Brunt. June is somebody who readers bond with as she struggles with the feeling of “being too average,” the loss of the one person who made her feel beyond that, and the inability to make sense of her now-very-different life and place in this world. Young and insecure and vulnerable, June Elbus strives to find her self-worth and value, feeling at a loss with a desire to be noticed and appreciated.
Readers connect to the text as they read how June assigned much of her self-value to the relationship with her uncle and how she relied on his support and encouragement. It is crazy to think how much we need others to feel good about ourselves, how if someone of special significance to us believes in us, then we can, too.
June, at just fourteen years old, is faced with the brevity of life for the first time:
““Don’t you know? That’s the secret. If you always make sure you’re exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the best people, then you won’t care if you die tomorrow.”
”That doesn’t make any sense. If you were so happy, then you’d want to stay alive, wouldn’t you? You’d want to be alive forever, so you could keep being happy.” …
”No, no. It’s the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven’t done everything they want to do. They think they haven’t had enough time. They feel like they’ve been shortchanged.” ”
A New York Time bestseller, Tell the Wolves I’m Home was published in 2012 by Carol Brunt. Brunt originally planned to write the novel as a short story, centered around a girl and her dying uncle, but as she wrote, the story developed more and more in her mind. Although the plot unfolds as a coming-of-age story, Brunt discloses that this was not her original intention, and she wanted to try something new with Tell the Wolves I’m Home: “To use a teen as a lens to see AIDS in the eighties wasn’t something I’d seen before.” It is unique enough to write a novel about AIDS, let alone adding the unique perspective of seeing the disease through a young girl’s eyes.
Brunt is an American novelist and short fiction writer who drew from her own New York City upbringing to form much of the setting for Tell the Wolves I’m Home. It was her debut novel, and she currently resides in England, working on her second. A very natural writer, Brunt says: “I’m very much an organic writer in that I don’t know a lot about how the story will develop until I get there.” Because of her style, the plot of Tell the Wolves I’m Home unrolls smoothly and naturally, but it does so with suspense and not without twists and surprises.
You would like this book if you are interested in coming-of-age novels and the LGBTQ genre. It is also similar to The Fault in Our Stars by John Green in the way that the novel follows a grieving teenager’s early perspective on death, specifically the death of a loved one, and how it shapes their present and future. If you have read Tell the Wolves I’m Home already, feel free to share your thoughts on it with us!
In conclusion, we leave you with a quote from the novel:
““I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn’t like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half the size. . . . I figured that, on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you’d have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.” ”