There is nothing like a book that can be so sad, and yet make you believe again in how fundamentally good and beautiful everything really is.Tell the Wolves I'm Home is a book like that.
So affirming, so sad, youthful and yet wise. It's all the best things about being a teenager and experiencing the intensity of real love and real loss.
Or being anyone and experiencing the intensity of real love and real loss.
It's not a perfect novel -- but it was that novel that was perfectly what I needed to read right now. Tell the Wolves I'm Home was like getting a letter from a really good friend who wrote to tell you how much you matter.
June Elbus loses her beloved uncle Finn to AIDS in 1986, when the particular cruelties of that diseases were just beginning to stoke fear and ravage lives without mercy.
June is awkward. Incredibly so. She's that kid who dresses like she believes she lives in the Middle Ages. And who, in fact, does like to pretend that she lives in the Middle Ages.
Only her beloved Uncle Finn (the remarkably financially successful artist) sees her. Only he knows her heart. And when she confesses to him one afternoon that she goes to the woods after school to pretend she's in another world:
He laughed and bumped his should against mine...We both knew we were the biggest nerds in the whole world.
When she loses him, she fears total invisibility:
Now that Finn's gone, nobody knows that I go to the woods after school. Sometimes I think nobody even remembers those woods exist at all.
But a few weeks after his death, a visit from a suspiciously unofficial postman starts June on her journey towards discovering that we are all invisible, and that we all need someone to see us. June herself, her seemingly-perfect older sister Greta, her complicated mother, and Finn's partner and love-of-his-life, Toby.
Almost implausibly self-aware June is, at times, also implausibly blind to her sister Greta's jealousy, heartache, and cries for help, but it is her relationship with Toby, a connection so outside the boundaries of what any normal person might expect out of a friendship, that is the driving emotional force of this novel. In losing Finn, they find each other, and together they create that sacred liminal space that all storybook friends know.
In one moment, after spending a magical day with Toby, June sits beside him and muses:
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.
Faithful readers of this blog will know that this is one of my most cherished beliefs.
It is difficult, at times nearly impossible, to find those worlds, particularly in moments of grief or loss. But a novel like Tell the Wolves I'm Home can be a very strong start.
Towards the end of the story, Toby tells June about his relationship with Finn. And he asks her:
"He saved me, you know?"
Toby means literally. But he also means in the ways that we are always saving each other -- by seeing one another for our best selves and helping one another to find worlds on top of and within worlds. And so, Dear Reader, does June save Toby; Toby saves June, and they saved me a little bit. Right when I needed it.
If you're not much of a YA fan, this might not be the novel for you. But if, like me, you still believe the best moments are those when you can pretend to be part of some secret, separate world, well, this novel will make your nerd-heart feel it is home.
