The Wolf

Publishers Weekly

Australian author Herrick (By the River) takes readers to the present-day outback in this moving story told in verse, which unfolds through the first-person narratives of 16-year-old Lucy Harding and 15-year-old Jake Jackson. Though they are neighbors, their lives could not be more different. Jake has a happy and loving family; Lucy's home life is dismal. Her father drinks and blames Lucy for his unhappiness. "I was bad luck./ I was the cause of the drought,/ the bushfire,/ the floods./ He was stuck here because of me." Rather than stand up to him, Lucy spends her days trying to avoid him. Anything she cares about he destroys ("I was so happy watching the bird/ .../ I didn't see Dad raise the gun/ and fire"). When Jake's father finds another sheep ripped to bits, the man is convinced the culprit is a wolf, and Lucy tells Jake she knows where it lives. Herrick smoothly portrays how Lucy's thoughts about the wild creature allow her to work through her feelings about her father. While on their trek, Jake is injured, and the two spend the night in a cave where Lucy tells him about her unhappy home life. In Jake's friendship Lucy finds her inner strength ("What Jake and I got./ That can't be touched;/ it can't be broken./ My father can bash me/ all he likes,/ but I know now,/ he can't touch me"). Herrick's fully realized characters convey their hopes in this touching, well-written story. Ages 12-up. (Apr.)

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VOYA - Megan Lynn Isaac

The isolated rural setting, the rugged Australian landscape, and the emotional barrenness of the central protagonist join elegantly the spare language of the free-verse poems in three voices that comprise this novel. Sixteen-year-old Lucy Harding simmers with repressed anger toward her abusive father, her compliant mother, and her naive younger brother. Unable to overtly rebel, she finds a symbol and an idol in a wild dog whose nighttime howls infuriate her father and whose wily command of the wilderness outwits the enraged man's attempts to hunt him down. The Hardings's only neighbors are the Jacksons. Fifteen-year-old Jake Jackson enjoys the company of his hardworking father, who teaches him to respect the land and shares with him an old story about a lone wolf who lives, despite all odds, in the wild country. The symbolic richness of the beast itself-part myth and part shadow, destroying and surviving, infuriating and inspiring-becomes a provocative lens for viewing both the men who struggle to find a livelihood and the children who inherit their successes and failures. Jake's quest to discover the truth about the creature that might truly be a wolf and Lucy's decision to find the creature she sees as the legendary wild dog bring the two together for an overnight adventure that spurs important changes in Lucy's family. As in his earlier verse novel, By the River (Front Street, 2006/VOYA August 2006), Herrick excels at deftly illustrating the small dramas that shape lives and the complicated emotional investments that underpin daily choices.

Kirkus Reviews

Lucy Harding lives on the appropriately named Battle Farm, located in an isolated and inhospitable area of Australia. That's an issue, but it's not the one that concerns Lucy most. The one that weighs most heavily in Lucy's heart is what to do about her abusive and alcoholic dad who keeps the women in the family in fear of violence. Her story alternates with that of her neighbor, 15-year-old Jake Jackson. Jake wonders about fate: Is he tied to the land as his parents are? And is his father always right? The two eventually decide to take a pilgrimage into the rocky forest in search of a wolf that they think they hear howling every night, even though wolves are not known to inhabit that terrain. Lucy thinks it's a feral dog that was once her pet, but escaped her father's wrath. Herrick is a skillful storyteller and a practiced hand at verse novels like this one. He skillfully intertwines the lives of the teenagers and resolves the story in a satisfying way. The exotic Australian countryside adds a layer of interest to a story that seems to be universal in the minds of young adults. (Fiction. 12-15)