Wilderness
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
Grainne's birth mother is coming to visit from America - a mum she has never seen before. As Grainne nervously waits for her arrival, her step-mother and two half-brothers decide to take a break. They are off to Finland for an adventure holiday, riding dog-sleds at a remote lodge. But when their mum is lost in the snowy wastes, the stage is set for a novel in two voices: a frantic story of seeking and finding which shrieks with nail-biting tension. A tale of snow and ice, and of courage and survival, this gripping story from world-class author Roddy Doyle will take your breath away.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Doyle (The Meanwhile Adventures) intertwines two story lines about children in search of missing mothers in an intriguing if hard to categorize novel. Gr inne's mother, Rosemary, left her marriage, her daughter, and Dublin for America 13 years earlier, when Gr inne was five, and hasn't contacted the girl until now. Reacting to Rosemary's announcement that she's coming back to Ireland to meet her daughter, Gr inne's stepmother, Sandra, decides to take her two sons Gr inne's half-brothers to Finland on a "wilderness safari," to escape the tense reunion. Chapters alternate between the two disparate settings, not always to good effect. Gr inne, perhaps understandably, is angry and unlikable, "a terrorist"; in an opening scene, Sandra and Frank, the children's father, clean up shards from the cup of coffee Gr inne has hurled at Sandra. The girl's tentative rapprochement with her long-lost mother comes too easily, at least in Doyle's restrained, shorthand-like exposition, and neither character seems fully developed. On the other hand, the boys' sojourn in the Finnish woods crackles with excitement as the two befriend the huskies that pull their sleds and learn enough to launch a daring rescue mission when their mother fails to turn up at a station one night. Fans of Gary Paulsen's survival stories will enjoy bouncing alongside Tom and Johnny as they head out into the frigid darkness in search of their beloved Mam, but these readers won't go for the Gr inne story line. Parents might find the revelations and narrative parallels more poignant than the target audience will. Ages 12-up.
