Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel (edition 2012)

June Elbus is a 14 yr. old girl growing up in Westchester outside of NYC in 1987. She feels socially inept and has a fascination with medieval times. Her walks in the forest behind her home afford her the opportunity to imagine herself back in time as the forest carries none of the trappings of modern society.

As the story opens June and her 16 yr. old sister, Greta, are having their portrait painted by their maternal Uncle Finn in his NYC apartment. Finn is June's godfather. He is a well known artist and he is dying of AIDs. The relationship between June and her uncle is a very special bond. He is the one who understands her fascination with medieval society and feeds her imagination with visits to The Cloisters, medieval fairs, movies, etc.

The story explores themes of love, sibling relationships, compassion, secrets, and art as a means of expression. There is a secret relationship, a high school musical, and a very well drawn cast of characters. The author has done an excellent job of capturing public sentiment towards AIDs in that time period and uses that as a vehicle to drive the plot.

I rate it at 5 stars. ( )

A simply fantastic coming of age novel. I think that adolescents experience emotions more powerfully sometimes than adults do, and the feeling of grief is no exception. In June Elbus, the reader finds a girl who doesn't fit in with the rest of the world but really doesn't care, in part because her individualism has been encouraged and nourished by her equally loner-type uncle Finn. Finn is really the only person June would count as a friend and someone who truly understands her, and thus his death from AIDS steals away the anchor of her teenage life. But when she finds out about a "friend" of her uncle's who she never knew about but nevertheless seemingly knows all about her, June starts on a path to try and come to grips with her loss and better understand her relationships with her parents and especially her sister, Greta.

The author nails the sibling dynamic between Greta and June perfectly, and creates nice symmetry to this relationship through June's mother and Finn's similar give-and-take (although we are only told about Finn and June's mother). There were so many parts of this book that just resonate so deeply from the heart that it's impossible to not feel your own life through it. Everyone has lost, and everyone has struggled to find a way to move on (as one characters asks "But where would we move to?"). But more than just the story of loss is the story of trying to make peace with your family and the secrets they carry. There's a saying out there of some sort about "always be nice to your siblings because they're the only ones who will be there through the long haul of your entire life" and that is certainly something this novel tries to grapple with.

I truly felt like June was a pretty original teenage girl who matures a lot through the book, and I could see June in my memories of girls from my adolescence.

Honestly, I just really, really loved the book. ( )

Enjoyed this book as I had no idea where the characters were going. It is intense for a younger teen but might be a good book for older teens. Is told from the 14-year old point of view of its' character June who is struggling with the death of a favorite uncle, his relationship with her sister and the disease her uncle died from. ( )

Sometimes one reads a book at precisely the proper time. And sometimes one reads a book and the proper time doesn't matter, nothing at all matters except the book and the self and the ways the two merge and tumble and meld. This book was like that for me.

Brunt evokes an era of uncertainty and fear with precision and a haunting nostalgia and then paints a complex and nuanced story on top of that background. It's so well-done that one falls in, rapt.

There are no perfect people herein. In fact, there's nobody to really like- but oh, there are people with whom one can identify. The writing is powerful, the prose is beautiful and the story, oh, the story is so real. So true. So hard.

One could call it a coming-of-age story, and that's probably closest to a capsule description. It's more than the story of how June finds out, at least a little bit, who June is. And who she is in relation to her sister, to her parents, to her recently dead uncle. It's many layers deeper than that.

So very well done it's hard to grasp that it's a first novel.

ETA:
You know how, this time of year, sometimes you see that certain slant of light hitting a gnarled old tree, and each leaf is illuminated and different from every other leaf and the whole thing glows like the end of the world? That's what this book is. ( )

EarlyWord review/blurb

The title Tell the Wolves I'm Home is the title of the portrait Finn paints of June and Greta before he dies. Throughout the novel, the painting sparks conversation and controversy.

June Elbus' closest relationship is with her godfather, her mother's younger brother Finn. When Finn dies of AIDS, she forms a relationship with Finn's "special friend," Toby. Finn kept Toby a secret from June and her older sister Greta as a condition imposed by their mother, who blames Toby for Finn's AIDS. (This is in 1987, when little was known about the disease, including how it was transmitted; the Elbus family watches a news report announcing the development of AZT.)

June's parents are accountants, and the novel takes place during tax season, when June and Greta are "tax orphans" while their parents work late. Thus, June is able to escape from Westchester and visit Toby in the city without being missed.

June's relationship with her sister Greta is also realistically rendered. June and Greta used to be best friends, but have grown apart. Greta has turned mean, but June doesn't see that this stems in part from her own "abandonment" of Greta in favor of Finn, then Toby. Both June and Greta need more of their parents' attention than they are receiving.

Carol Rifka Blunt captures the thoughts and emotions of 13/14-year-old June perfectly: how her sister's taunts hit home; her awareness - but limited understanding - of what goes on behind the scenes in the adult world; her love for Finn, her shame, her jealousy of Toby; her sympathy, her low self-esteem and uncertainty, her "greedy heart"; her desire to be understood and her fear that she won't be. Blunt also captures the issue of AIDS at a certain moment in history, when otherwise reasonable people acted unreasonably out of fear.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home is a well-written, unique book, appealing for both adults and teens.

Quotes:

"Believe what you want," she said, turning away and heading for the stairs.
But that was impossible and Greta knew it. You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not. (6)

I kept quiet, knowing that the sadness I was feeling was the wrong kind of sadness...I stared out the car window and understood that I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit. (25)

Greta's talk is like a geode. Ugly as anything on the outside and for the most part the same on the inside, but every once in a while there's something that shines through. (52)

He patted me on the shoulder and told me that he knew what I meant. That usually the first version you hear is the one you'll love for the rest of your life. (100)

I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there. (101)

A portrait is a picture where somebody gets to choose what you look like. How they want to see you. A camera catches whatever happens to be there when it clicks. (116)

But the sadness stayed with me. Not only sadness because I wasn't part of Toby and Finn's world but also because there were things about Finn that weren't Finn at all....What if everything I loved about Finn had really come from Toby? Maybe that's why I felt like I'd known Toby for years and years. Maybe all along Toby had been shining right through Finn. (148)

Once you know a thing you can't ever unknow it, and the book sat there like a fire in my closet. (155)

Without Finn, Toby was like a kite with nobody holding the string. (232)

I had no idea how greedy my heart really was. (233)

And maybe that's what it meant. Tell the Wolves I'm Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they'll find you anyway. They always do. (328)
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