The Big Bad Wolf in My House

Written by Valérie Fontaine

Illustrated by Nathalie Dion

Translated by Shelley Tanaka

Groundwood Books

978-1-77306-501-4

32 pp.

Ages 5-8

March 2021

It's International Women's Day and, to women who find themselves in abusive home circumstances and explore ways to cope including fighting back legally or finding shelter elsewhere, we stand by you, and Valérie Fontaine and Nathalie Dion offer hope.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion

A little girl could always see through the wolf who married her mother.

He batted his eyelashes and purred like a pussycat

in front of my mother.

But he looked at me with cold eyes and sharp teeth.

The honeymoon was sour, like lemons.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion

But when her mother gets home late from work one day, the wolf show his true self, shouting names and hurling food. The child removes herself from the situation, but she can see the impact it has on her mother whose smile begins to droop along with her body.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion

Her mother tries to shield her child but the wolf is scary, leaving finger marks on the girl's arms and coming into her room as he chooses.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion

But one day, with only five minutes notice, her mother declares that they are leaving. They go to a house full of kind mothers and children but no wolves. 

The big bad wolf can huff and puff all he wants,

but this house will not fall down.

The little girl knows the tale about a big bad wolf. It's the one where he huffs and puffs to blow the house down. The little ones in the story try to protect themselves in shelters of straw and wood but to no avail. Same with this child. She tries a fortress of blankets to shield herself, or a closed door of wood but neither stops the big bad wolf. She does build "a fort made of bricks. I put it up around my heart." But it's not until they go to a new house, a shelter for women and children, that they find safety.

Told from the child's perspective and analogous to the story of the big bad wolf and the three little pigs, The Big Bad Wolf in My House makes a situation of domestic abuse very disquietingly elementary. The mother marries a man who is abusive to her and her child. He may appear sheep-like to begin with but he's dangerous. Both mother and child find ways to cope with the physical or emotional attacks, but coping is not safety. It's just a delay. Both in its original French (Le grand méchant loup dans ma maison, 2020) and this English edition (translated by Shelley Tanaka), Valérie Fontaine's story demonstrates the impact of domestic abuse on the whole family and how adults and children find their own ways to survive. Though she parallelizes the chilling abuse of a man against his new wife and stepchild with a child's fable, Valérie Fontaine never, never trivializes the situation, only gives it context. After all, the big bad wolf could be any one. 

I was just introduced to Nathalie Dion's work last week (I Found Hope in a Cherry Tree by Jean E. Pendziwol) and realize how versatile her art is, creating lightness and hope in one book and now tension and despair in The Big Bad Wolf in My House. Painting by hand with gouache and digitally with a pastel brush, Nathalie Dion still imbues her illustrations with the starkness of the family situation, engulfed with shadows and angles and using colour and lightness minimally and generally only associated with the child or situations outside the home. 

Some may despair of this tale of domestic abuse but Valérie Fontaine and Nathalie Dion have taken us through the darkness from a child's perspective and shown us an outcome that offers the promise of respite.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion

We Contain Multitudes

Written by Sarah Henstra

Penguin Teen

978-0-735264212

384 pp.

Ages 14+

May 2019

We might as well take advantage of the fact that we don't owe each other anything, that no one else is ever going to read what we're writing, that it's just me and you and whatever we feel like saying. (pg. 19)

When Adam Kurlansky and Jonathan Hopkirk begin their correspondence, it's as an assignment for Ms. Khang's English classes. Kurl, as he is widely known from excelling at football and basketball, is repeating his senior year while Jo is a Grade 10 Walt Whitman aficionado. Though their first letters follow their teacher's directives to introduce themselves and discuss topics like their heroes, Jonathan really gets into the writing, sharing about his father Lyle and sister Shayna, his passion for poetry and folk and bluegrass music, and what is happening around school, including the bullying he endures at the hands of a group of students he calls the "butcherboys." His narratives are generally observational, always poetic and often psychologically astute, though it takes some time for Kurl to begin to share his secrets including of physical abuse and his take on his own life and the people in it, as well as what he sees happening to "Little Jo."

I mean weird kids do have this aura to them.  It's like a smell almost. They're stuck somewhere in their heads, in some kind of a bubble. People can't really help themselves: They see a bubble, they want to pop it. (pg. 12)

But as they continue to correspond, now beyond the assignment's scope, Jo and Kurl develop a relationship on paper and in person, and one that brings emotional and physical support and finally love.  We Contain Multitudes may be an examination of how we present a multitude of selves to ourselves, our families, our peers and strangers but We Contain Multitudes is a love story. It's about finding love through words and sharing those multitudes of ourselves and developing new selves with others.  Jonathan is a son of a single dad and a dead mother with a fuzzy history, a brother, a poetry lover, a musician, a victim, and an aesthete while Kurl is a brother, a punching bag, an athlete, a thinker, a cook, a hard worker, and a secret-keeper. But with others, they are more because we are all combinations and permutations of our selves, depending on others in or not in our lives and on the events that change us. Our identities are sweeping and dynamic, and we all contain multitudes. And isn't it wonderful when two become even more because of love?

I am completely, one hundred percent of the time filled up with you. (pg. 189)

Sarah Henstra may have won last year's Governor General Literature Award for her adult novel The Red Word (ECW, 2018) but I'm gratified that she has returned to her YA roots. (I reviewed her first book Mad Miss Mimic (Razorbill, 2015) and interviewed Sarah Henstra too.) The writing is exquisite, the voices of Jonathan and Adam deep and sorrowful and passionate, and the convergence of their stories creates something bigger than the parts.

As I finished this novel of letters, a book I didn't want to leave, hopeful of the many multitudes of Jonathan and Kurl still to come, I'm overwhelmed with the infinitude of these young men and of Sarah Henstra's story. They and it know to  "Be real and be true" (pg. 9) and are, and I want more.

Saving Grad

Written by Karen Spafford-Fitz

James Lorimer & Co., Ltd.

978-1-4594-1252-1

160 pp.

Ages 13+

RL 5.0

August 2017

Mandy is right about one thing.  I have no idea how to be fun.  I had it beat out of me a long time ago. (pg. 97)

It's been beat out of her by her alcoholic, cocaine-abusing step-dad, Duncan, who has made her life and that of her mother Sophie a misery for two years.  Her mother is reluctant to leave, accustomed to the fine home and life style of wealth, but Vienna sees beyond the facade of a good life, apprehensive what could eventually happen if they stay.  When Duncan has a fall that lands him in hospital, Vienna is determined to pack themselves up and flee.  They head to Edmonton where, with the help of an outreach worker, they get a basement apartment and begin to make a new life, slowly.

Though initially happy to drown her sorrows, Sophie gets a job at a Starbucks and insists that Vienna get registered for her final year of high school.  To make it more difficult for Duncan to find them, Vienna decides to go by Vienna Fleury, using the last name of her Métis grandmother, Mémère.  Sophie and her mother may not have spoken for years–since they'd argued about her marriage to Duncan–but Vienna misses Mémère and calls her occasionally to keep her from worrying, though she never reveals where they are.

At her new high school, Vienna tries to stay under the radar but a friendly classmate named Mandy draws her into the school's social scene, enlisting Vienna's help on the grad party committee. Although Vienna begins to enjoy school and her mother is establishing a support system and relishing her independence, regardless of how financially strapped they are, you know things have to go awry.  Saving grad may be the least of Vienna's worries.

As part of Lorimer's SideStreets series of hi-lo (high interest-low vocabulary) books, Saving Grad is a fast read in plotting and word count.  But don't mistake a hi-lo read for a lesser story.  Author Karen Spafford-Fitz capably creates an intense plot of relationships between family and friends which can be positive and negative, supportive or destructive, and she makes sure to take us along on that bus ride.  Like Vienna and Sophie ending up in Edmonton in the middle of winter, the destination may not be an easy one at first but it is a fulfilling one in the end.  Saving Grad is bigger than the indisputable distress of physical abuse.  It's a story of resilience and strength and making something good out of something bad.  Karen Spafford-Fitz makes Saving Grad into saving Vienna and Sophie and others too.

Me (and) Me

Written by Alice Kuipers

HarperCollins Canada

9781443448826

288 pp.

Ages 14+

April 2017

Lark Hardy’s seventeenth birthday should’ve been a fun day, and it had begun that way, a first date with Alec Sandcross canoeing at Pike Lake.  But one moment changes everything.  As the teens are about to embark on some swimming, a cry from Suzanne Fields, the mother of five-year-old Annabelle whom Lark had babysat, draws their attention to the child face down in the water. Alec dives in but hits his head and starts going down.  And as Suzanne yells at Lark to do something, the teen hesitates, not knowing whom to save.  So begins a novel split in two voices, both Larks and both Lark’s.

The first Lark begins to describe the days after the near drowning in which Alec has been saved and Annabelle lays in a hospital bed in a coma. Alec and Lark’s new relationship is blossoming, and he begins to teach her how to do parkour, climbing, running and jumping across obstacles such as buildings and bridges. Becoming so entwined with the attentive and charismatic Alec, Lark starts blowing off best friend Lucy and bandmates Nifty, Reid and Iona to spend time with Alec.  When she starts getting weird messages on her phone about Alec not being saved, Lark is disconcerted but has no answers. But when she visits Annabelle in the hospital, and hallucinates that she’s drowning in water and then glimpses a girl who is but isn’t her, Lark starts to think she’s going crazy.

In an alternate voice and chapters, a second Lark, one who cuts her hair short and dyes it red, recounts those same days, but ones in which music exec Martin Fields and wife Suzanne are ever grateful to her for saving their young daughter while Alec’s family sits by his hospital bedside, contemplating turning off the machines that are keeping him alive.  Lark still harbours much anger about her mother’s passing and translates that anger into petty shoplifting of items she doesn’t even want.  But though this Lark is starting to connect with bandmate Reid, she too is baffled by freaky messages including those of a not-hospital bound Alec and an intimate relationship with him.

Lark, whether the long- and dark-haired one or she of the red hair, have similar circumstances: a musical mother who has passed; a dad with heart issues; best friend Lucy; a passion for writing songs; and playing with bandmates Reid, Iona and Nifty.  She is also starting to suspect she’s losing it, seeing things like imaginary water near drowning her and disappearing messages.

The linchpin for Lark becomes the lyrics her mother started penning before her death.

Perhaps you see it differently
You and me
It’s just a case of who tells the story
Perhaps you see it differently. (pg. 86)

Showering her intense text with astounding lyrics, Alice Kuipers  brings both Larks together to juxtapose the parallel lives they lead after the near drowning at the lake.  Confused by grief, fears and even guilt, both girls (or are they really two?) attempt to make sense of a world in which their own choices for actions have consequences that they wish they could undo.  They are two halves of the same whole, different but similar. They are Me (and) Me.  (There’s even a crazy moment when the two face off and shout, “Who even are you?” “Who the hell are you?”; pg. 240) It’s hard to say whether the two will come together equally, though Lark recognizes that,

I have to stitch myself back together.  I have to make myself whole. (pg. 270)

or whether Lark will become more of one than the other.  However, it’s clear that Alice Kuipers in her daring storytelling and almost maternal concern for her characters wants to help keep Lark together. Life is hard enough without questioning your decisions, especially those made under pressure, and when literally being torn apart by them.  I can’t tell you how it ends (you’ll see when you read Me (and) Me) but I can tell you that the story comes full circle, secured in its own way, though not tied up as you might expect.

Check back tomorrow for my Me (and) Me blog tour stop with a guest post by author Alice Kuipers.  Ever enlightening, Alice Kuipers speaks about why she writes YA.

Beware That Girl

by Teresa Toten

Delacorte Press

978-0-553-50790-4

336 pp.

Ages 14+

May 2016

Kate and Olivia.  Two eighteen-year-old seniors at a private school known as Waverly in New York City.  It’s hard to tell which girl is “that girl” mentioned in the title Beware That Girl.  Kate, the brilliant, manipulative liar who plans out every step she takes to ensure she gets the “big life she wants” or Olivia, rich and beautiful but emotionally fragile “just messed up enough” (pg. 4) for Kate to befriend.  The two secretive girls are “Two unlikely peas in a pod” (pg. 47) in more ways than one.

Kate O’Brian, a high-achieving Waverly scholar, is determined to get to Yale regardless of her current status as a basement boarder and employee at Chen’s Chinese Market and Apothecary.  Also working mornings at the school office, Kate searches for her ticket out of her miserable situation and targets Olivia Sumner whose record indicates missed school due to psychological issues.  The two girls become acquainted and, when charmed by the new director of fundraising, the charismatic Mark Redkin, to start a Student Advancement Committee, Kate gets Olivia, as well as classmates Serena, Morgan and Claire on board.  Soon Olivia has asked Kate to move in to the penthouse she shares with her globe-trotting lawyer father and their housekeeper Anka.

“Becoming friends was a kind of courtship.  A ritual of presenting your best self to the other.  Each knew not to push too much, too fast.  In their conversations, the girls reached for all their similarities willfully ignoring the differences.” (pg. 38)

It’s the differences and secrets that still separate the girls, neither being completely honest about their pasts and fears and desires.  They each have an agenda for their friendship, which becomes all the more complicated when Olivia becomes involved in an intimate relationship with Mark Redkin.  Recognizing him as a “player of biblical proportions” (pg. 120), Kate sees Redkin as more than a threat to their friendship, realizing that “Redkin was going for power, information and amusement.  What a trifecta.” (pg. 155)

Beware That Girl is a suspense-laden, surprise-ending story that provides a glimpse of a friendship based on the instability of secrets and schemes.  And even though there are moments of affability and benevolence–usually involving the irascible Mrs. Chen, the girls’ shared mutt Bruce, and the thoughtful Johnny who is crushing on Kate–Teresa Toten’s intimate portrayal of a friendship initiated in manipulation will disquiet the reader.  From the onset of the book, a scene in which one girl sits at the hospital bed of another while the police wait to question them, Beware That Girl is dominated by uncertainty and foreboding.  Teresa Toten may tease the reader with storylines that intimate which character should be heeded but you’ll never know for certain.  That is, until her crushing ending that reveals the strength of Teresa Toten’s plotting, story-telling and characterizations.  Don’t be alarmed if you have to reread the final four-page chapter–I did–just to assure yourself that this masterful writer has truly reconciled all those secrets and agendas in a bombshell of an ending.  She does and it is.