Wolf Hollow Paperback – Big Book, 3 April 2018

cosa posso dire di questo libro che ha un buon profumo di carta da leggere e un prezzo buonissimo e una consegna ultraveloce

Einwandfrei

Más económico que la librería

very nice book got it at very nice condition

This review is by Jennifer Donnelly and appeared in the New York Times Book Review on May 8, 2016. I cannot improve on this review so I am submitting it here in full.Hard truths abound in “Wolf Hollow,” Lauren Wolk’s haunting coming-of-age novel, her first book for young readers. The hardest of all is this: Doing right can go very wrong.“The year I turned 12, I learned how to lie,” Annabelle, the main character, tells us as the story opens. That year is 1943. World War II is raging, and families in ­Annabelle’s rural Pennsylvania community have lost sons, but the conflict is a distant one. Annabelle’s life, bounded by her family’s farm and a one-room ­schoolhouse, is sheltered and safe. Her biggest worries are her annoying little brothers and the unruly older boys at school. She’s never had cause to lie.Until the day Betty Glengarry arrives. A city girl, Betty has been sent to live with her grandparents because she’s incorrigible. Her mother can’t handle her; her father’s gone. Betty’s a bully — and much worse, it turns out, than ­incorrigible.“I didn’t know a word that described Betty properly,” Annabelle says, “or what to call the thing that set her apart from the other children in that school.” Betty is a “dark-hearted girl,” one without morals or remorse, who beats Annabelle with a stick and breaks a bird’s neck.Annabelle is afraid of her, but she’s also at an age where children are ­eager to prove their mettle, and decides to handle the threat herself. “Betty was mine to fear, and I decided that she was mine to disarm. If I could. On my own.” She can’t, though, and when Betty’s cruelty escalates — with devastating consequences — Annabelle confides in her parents. When they confront Betty and her grandparents, the wily girl lies her way out of trouble and directs suspicion toward Toby — a reclusive, shellshocked veteran.Betty’s determination to frame an innocent thrusts Annabelle into a predicament far more difficult than deciding whether or not to tattle on a bully. With a child’s single-mindedness, she decides that the right thing to do is to protect Toby — even if pulling that off requires a few wrongs. That lies sometimes succeed while truth fails is only one of the tough complexities Annabelle must face. Early in the book, she recalls asking her grandfather how Wolf Hollow got its name. Long ago, he explains, the people who lived here dug pits to trap wolves. They shot the wolves that were getting “too brave and too many,” and turned their ears in for a bounty.Thinking of the wolves in the pits saddens Annabelle, but her grandfather, “a serious man who always told me the truth, which I didn’t always want,” points out that she didn’t mourn the snake he killed last spring. She replies that copperheads are poisonous, and “that’s different.” “Not to the snake, it isn’t,” her grandfather says. “Or to the God who made it.”This god — the god of wolves, snakes and Betty Glengarry — is an ancient, ­feral deity, one unconcerned with human constructs of right and wrong, and Annabelle soon realizes that pitfalls dark and deep lie hidden on the path to adulthood, some of them large enough to swallow us whole.“Wolf Hollow” is beautifully written, with spare, simple language perfectly suited to its subject and setting. Annabelle narrates in the past tense, and Wolk uses this device to great effect, masterfully balancing a mood of aching regret with an electric sense of ominousness. Painting rural life with an even hand, she shows its beauty and its hardship, the strong ties that bind people who live in the country and the intolerance that sometimes finds root there.The book’s narrative builds suspensefully toward an ending that’s wrenching and true, and in its final pages, Annabelle learns to abide by life’s complexities. She thinks of Wolf Hollow as “a dark place, no matter how bright its canopy, no matter how pretty the flowers that grew in its capricious light,” but also the place “where I learned to tell the truth in that year before I turned 12: about things from which refuge was impossible. Wrong, even. No matter how tempting.” With a precociously perceptive girl as a main character; a damaged, misunderstood recluse; and themes of prejudice and bigotry, comparisons to Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” will abound. But Wolk gives us her own story — one full of grace and stark, ­brutal beauty.To read the review at the NYTimes: [...]