Amphilinidea

Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book 1
Author(s)	Colin Meloy
Illustrator	Carson Ellis
Cover artist	Carson Ellis
Country	US
Language	English
Series	The Wildwood Chronicles
Genre(s)	Children's literature
Publisher	Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins)
Publication date	August 30, 2011
Media type	Print (Hardback tr. bdg. acid-free paper)
Pages	541 (hardback 1st edition)
ISBN	978-0-06-202468-8
OCLC Number	703205798
Followed by	Under Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book Two

Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book 1 is a children's fantasy novel by Colin Meloy, illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis. The natural beauty and culture of Portland, Oregon feature prominently in the book, combined with fantastic elements like talking animals and witchcraft, inspired by classic fantasy tales and folklore. It is the first in a planned series of at least three books, to be written while Meloy's work with his band The Decemberists is on hiatus.

Wildwood received mostly positive reviews as an engrossing story appropriate for its target age, and was especially praised for Ellis's illustrations, and the old-fashioned book design. Some reviewers said the plot sometimes dragged, found the use of local color cloying, or said the violence could be inappropriate for some readers.

Plot

Middle school students Prue McKeel and Curtis Mehlberg attempt to rescue Prue's baby brother, Mac, who was carried off by crows to the forbidden Impassible Wilderness. Prue and Curtis discover that the Impassible Wilderness is populated by humans and anthropomorphic animals who speak and use tools. The humans and animals form a number of contentious nations and factions, weaving a web of shifting political alliances and rivalries. Prue and Curtis become entangled in the intrigue and wars of the Wood, and learn their true nature as "half-breeds", having a mystical connection to the Wood that allows them to pass through the Woods Magic barrier, the Periphery Bind, that keeps the Outsiders, or ordinary people of Portland, out.

Setting

The setting of the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland and the Impassible Wilderness, based on the real life Forest Park, is Wildwood's "most distinctive element."^[2] Forest Park is about 8 miles (13 km) long and 1 mile (1.6 km) wide, containing 5,100 acres (2,100 ha) of natural woods, mostly second growth forest with some old growth, all within the city limits of Portland.^[3]

Meloy and Ellis live on the edge of the park and frequently hike its trails, where they found inspiration for geography of the series.^[4][5] A large map of the Wood, consisting of the countries of North Wood and South Wood with the Avian Principality and the untamed Wildwood in between, covers the book's endpapers, and detail maps are included in the sections inside.^[6] The maps, mirroring Forest Park but with fantastical alterations, were drawn before the plot or any characters of Wildwood were created, and the story was built up around the imagined geography.^[1][4]

The St. Johns Bridge. In the universe of Wildwood, this is the Ghost Bridge, existing only when a rune magic spell is cast and not apparent in everyday life. Without the St. Johns Bridge, the Impassible Wilderness is all the more isolated.

Nearly every location in the imaginary setting is carried over from the real Forest Park and its surroundings, but filled with fantasy characters and often given a new role.^[4] Pittock Mansion appears under its real name, but serves as the seat of government of South Wood, while the Oregon Zoo is the South Wood Prison. The Audubon Society of Portland is the approximate location of the Avian Principality.^[4] Ellis said there are a number of large trees in Forest Park, but no a specific tree served as the model for the North Wood Council Tree.^[4]

The St. Johns Bridge, however, is missing, and unknown to the people of Wildwood's Portland. In the fictional parallel universe of the book, the only access Prue and Curtis have to pursue the crows into the Impassible Wilderness is a risky dash over the train tracks of the Railroad Bridge, the Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge 5.1 in our world.^{[4] [6]:33–40, 331–340, 346–349, plate 4} The St. Johns Bridge does appear briefly, as the Ghost Bridge, conjured by a rune magic spell. In a question and answer session with Meloy and Ellis, a young reader suggested the Ghost Bridge could be interpreted as an apparition of a bridge that once existed in the past, implying that Wildwood takes place in our world's future.^[4] Meloy replied that this is not the case, and that he has "another story in mind" as to the origin of the Ghost Bridge, and that Wildwood is meant to be more or less contemporary with our time.^[4]

The character of contemporary Portland, or at least a popular stereotype of Portland's youth culture, is expressed in Prue and Curtis, and Prue's parents.^[1][7][8] The kids are "bespectacled, bike-riding, vinyl-­browsing, Kurosawa-­referencing children."^[7] Loving descriptions of real elements of Portland are combined to create a "richly satisfying weave of reality and fantasy."^[9]

Characters

The first human Prue meets in the Wood is an old man driving a mail truck, Richard, the South Wood Postmaster General. She sees in him something she, "couldn't put her finger on that seemed to exude from him, something that made him seem like no one she'd ever met before. It was a kind of aura or shine, like the way a familiar landscape is transformed in the light of a full moon." The natives of the Wood are consistently able to recognize Prue and Curtis as Outsiders, who ought not to be able to enter through the Periphery Bind surrounding the Wood, while only the people of the pastoral and meditative North Wood can also see that Prue and Curtis have a dual nature as "half-breeds", both of Outsiders and of the Wood, unhindered by the magical barrier. There are no specifics given on the mechanics of this sense.^[6]

Prue

Prue McKeel, age 12, is from the beginning of Wildwood to the end, decisive, determined, and courageous,^[11] finding inspiration in Nancy Drew in her effort to rescue her brother, and along the way, save Curtis and the Wood itself. Unlike Curtis, she is not cowed by anyone, standing up to Lars Svik the Governor-Regent of South Wood,^{[6]:123–130} Crown Prince Owl Rex of the Avian Principality, and even the fearsome Alexandra, the Dowager Governess, as well as her parents. She is a precocious seventh grader with a talent for nature drawing, an encyclopedic knowledge of birds, having kept The Sibley Guide to Birds overdue from the library for three months, and takes Honors English with her classmate Curtis. Like her parents, and Curtis, Prue is "very-Portland", with stereotypical interests like yoga, vegetarianism, and single-speed bicycles, which she repairs and tunes herself.^{[6]:42, 337[1][12]} Because Prue's birth came about by Alexandra using witchcraft to overcome Prue's parents' difficulty conceiving a child, she shares some essence of the Wood, along with being an Outsider, which is what made it possible for her to cross the magical barrier that protects the Wood.^{[6]:331–340} Meloy said that Prue is a composite character, "partly Carson as a kid," with her "inner world" coming from Ellis's childhood.^[13][14] She is also based on the niece of a friend, a girl with, "an amazing independent streak that we’ve always admired."^[14]

Curtis

Curtis Mehlberg is 11 and a seventh grade classmate of Prue's, though not her close friend at the beginning of Wildwood. In the past Prue and Curtis shared an interest in drawing superhero fan art, but Prue has moved on to botanical illustration, leaving Curtis and his love of comic books behind. He is an awkward "persecuted loner" who lacks Prue's confidence,^[11] and is, at first, easily intimidated and manipulated by Prue, Alexandra, and others. He grows in the course of the book, gaining a more definite sense of who he is after being forced to choose sides and stand up to the Dowager Governess Alexandra. His relationship with Alexandra recalls the seduction of Edmund Pevensie by the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.^[2] After being hustled into an ill-fitting role as an officer in the coyote army, he inadvertently distinguishes himself in battle. Later, by free choice, he becomes a full member of the bandits, and decides to stay behind with them in Wildwood, even as Prue returns home to St. Johns. Like Prue, Curtis is a "half-breed" who has a dual nature that allows him to enter the Wood, but the exact nature of this connection not revealed in Wildwood, other than Curtis speculating that he has a strange reclusive aunt, and a number of odd relatives.^[6]

Curtis's choice to stay in Wildwood leaves behind a grieving family in Portland. Meloy said that reading fantasy stories growing up, about, "kids going to other worlds or crossing over to another place, it would invariably involve them coming back at the end," and, "Whenever that character made a choice to come back, it didn't feel true to me for some reason." So Meloy wanted to experiment with a character who did what Meloy himself wanted to do, even though he had a happy childhood and loving family, and stay behind and get "sucked into that world" completely.^[4] Meloy said, "Curtis I relate to… I think of Curtis as being a version of myself," reflecting that as a child he, "desperately longed to be taken away to another world."^[4][13][14]

Alexandra

The exiled Dowager Governess of South Wood, Alexandra, is the main antagonist of Wildwood. She leads an army of coyotes she gathered from the ill-governed scavenging coyote population of Wildwood. She was deposed from South Wood and sent into Wildwood, expected to die there, after it was discovered she had created by magic an automaton to replace her dead son. The death of their child had driven Alexandra's husband, the Governor-Regent Grigor Svik, to his death bed, and Alexandra to extremes in her grief. The action of Wildwood is driven by her plot to take revenge on everyone and everything in the Wood, in which she intends to use Prue's brother Mac as a blood sacrifice in a spell to control the Wood's ivy, which will then grow out of control and consume every living thing in the Wood.^[6] The real Forest Park is under continual threat from invasive English ivy (Hedera helix) which has the potential to create an "ivy desert" monoculture, like the magical ivy apocalypse that Alexandra plotted.^[15]

Genre and style

HarperCollins said Wildwood is for ages 9 and up, and most critics call it a children's novel,^[16] or middle grade book,^[17] but some critics class it as young-adult fiction (YA or YAL).^[9][12][18] Simultaneously, the book is being marketed at adults, both Decemberists fans and adult fans of children's and young adult literature.^[1] Meloy said the book's 541 page length was comparable to many of the books he enjoyed at Wildwood's target age, and Ellis noted that, "a 10 year old kid can be a voracious reader."^[19]

Wildwood echoes several classic fantasy and children's tales, notably J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.^[11][8][20] The kidnapping of a child by crows comes from Irish folktales of the Sluagh, and from Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There where a girl rescues her brother kidnapped by goblins.^[1][11] The literary tone of Decemberists songs is apparent in the writing style, with a weakness for the charms of archaic language, and a bookish middle-schooler's love of stretching her vocabulary with "50 cent words".^[1][11][12] The folklore roots of the band's songs, love of nature, and romanticized historical periods are apparent in Wildwood as well. Carson Ellis's illustrations, ever present on Decemberists album covers, are consistent with that tone, having a dark and playfully macabre tone reminiscent of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl.^[1][5][11]

Carson Ellis's favorite Wildwood drawing, a badger pulling a rickshaw, was included in the story solely so she could draw it.

The factions of the Wood use a variety of technologies from the past, including cutlasses, blunderbusses, flintlocks, and vehicles like trucks and trains. No attempt was made to maintain a consistent level of technological advancement or justify why a particular device was used; rather, Meloy said they could, "pick coolest version of whatever piece of technology" they wanted. According to Ellis, they "just picked whatever we liked."^[4] Though the text pointedly mentions Prue's single-speed bicycle,^[6]:3 the illustrations twice show her bike having derailleur gears, which are only present on multi-speed bikes.^{[6]:23, 431} When she first meets the South Wood postman Richard, he threatens her with a shotgun, which in the same paragraph is referred to a double-barrelled rifle, then on the next page it is called a shotgun again.^[6]:62–63

Carson Ellis said that her favorite drawing among Wildwood's 85 illustrations is of a badger pulling a rickshaw, a relatively minor illustration compared with the full page color plates depicting pivotal scenes that grace the book. Meloy said that the scene it illustrated, of a friendly animal who appears at an opportune moment to offer Prue a ride after she escaped from captivity in the Pittock Mansion, was not vital to the plot, and an editor wanted to cut it from the book. But Meloy had written it specifically because he thought Ellis would enjoy drawing the badger and rickshaw, so he fought to keep it in.^[4] Booklist's Daniel Kraus highlighted the image as representative of the book, commenting, "If you like stories in which spunky kids emerge from secret tunnels only to be greeted by smartly outfitted badgers operating rickshaws, this is your book."^[21] Ellis commented, "That's one of the moments when the story seems really stream-of-consciousness. Prue pops up out of a manhole, and a badger comes by with a rickshaw and gives her a ride free of charge, and it's like, why not? It's such a great image."^[6]:173[22]

Development history

The book was first conceived by Meloy and Ellis before The Decemberists were formed, when they first moved to Portland and were living in a warehouse where they, "had this idea of working on a novel together … because we enjoyed making up stories and playing off one another's creative impulses."^[11] Meloy cites Tolkien, and Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain books that he read growing up as important influences, along with Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, from which, "that idea of a world within the real world and the implausibility of the whole enterprise was a direct influence."^[4][14] Ellis said her favorite books growing up were The Chronicles of Narnia, and that later as an illustrator the numerous illustrations in the seven books of that series were a direct inspiration.^[4] Unlike the other half dozen books Ellis has illustrated, where the text is completed before the illustrator was called in, she collaborated with Meloy throughout the writing.^[1]

Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy at a book signing in Portland.

After writing the first 80 pages, Meloy put book on hold for several years while they worked, respectively, on Meloy's music and Ellis's book illustration. When work resumed on the novel, the title changed from How Ruthie Ended the War to Wildwood, Ruthie became Prue, and the object of her quest changed from her lost father to her kidnapped brother.^[11] Meloy said the early version of the story was also, "wildly inappropriate for children."^[1][4] Once they resumed work on the novel, Ellis said it took about two years to complete.^[4] Meloy said he feared his entry into fiction writing would be seen as "dabbling", wanting to avoid creating a "vanity project" like Madonna's picture books.^[5] Five publishers sought the rights to the Wildwood series before being won by the HarperCollins imprint Balzer + Bray, with a first print run of 250,000 copies.^[5]

Meloy has said The Decemberists will be on hiatus and not releasing another album for a few years, as he intends to write at least two more books for the Wildwood Chronicles.^[5][11] Meloy said the second Wildwood novel will have Prue returning to the Wood, "her life very much in danger", in a plot involving "scheming industrialists trying to worm their way into Wood" from the Outside. Meloy also revealed that the next book will show a much "weirder Portland", and the supernatural will not be confined to the Wood, and that he decided he would no longer constrain the denizens of the Wood to the native species of Forest Park.^[4] The second book in the series, Under Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book Two, is expected to be released in the Fall of 2012.^[23][24] Meloy said more books are planned, "There’s Book 2 and Book 3, and probably Book 4 and 5. There’ll be many more."^[25]

Reception

Wildwood was on The New York Times Best Seller Children's Chapter Books list for two weeks, ranking 7th the first week and 9th the second.^[26] The book won, in a tie with Colin Meloy's sister Maile Meloy's The Apothecary, the 2012 Middle Reader E.B. White Read Aloud Award.^[27][28]

Overall, the book received positive reactions. Critics praised the quality of the illustrations, noting the old-fashioned style of the hardcover edition with maps on the end papers and a select set of color plates.^{[2][7][12][29]} The A.V. Club's Tasha Robinson found the book, in spite of its flaws, "a perfect balance of middle-school-age-appropriate simplicity and more challenging writing that makes the book adult-accessible."^[2] Meloy's rich descriptive language, of action, and especially the natural setting, were among the book's strengths, while a lack of character development and over-reliance on familiar fantasy tropes were cited as weaknesses.^[2] Similarly, The New Yorker found that the use of familiar motifs could sometimes be "formulaic" but it was nonetheless a well told tale that was, "never condescending", and that Meloy's original contribution to conventions of the genre was his allegorical exploration of contemporary political and military struggle, including diplomacy, revolution, and ethnic cleansing.^[29]

The most frequent criticism was that the pace dragged in some places,^[12][30] which some critics speculated was necessary setup for subsequent novels in the series.^[9][31] Some critics said they were "rankled" at the "arch" and "Portland-y" mention such local lifestyle tropes as cork flooring and recycling bins.^[12] Prue's riding to the final battle on her bicycle caused The New York Times's Claire Dederer to quip, "bicycle heroism: it doesn't get any more Portland than that."^[9] The regionalisms came on strong enough to bring to some critics' minds the Portlandia TV series that pokes fun at the oddities of Portland culture.^[9][12]

The first negative review of Wildwood appeared following the release of the novel in the UK.^[31] The Stirling Observer's Gregor White said that the story begins well, and agreed with other critics that the setting is an impressive work, but in sum judged that the book, "somehow ends up as one big shoulder shrug of indifference."^[31] While other critics had reservations about the novel switching back and forth between the story threads of Prue and Curtis after they become separated early in the story, White said this "flitting back and forth" is an insurmountable "structural problem" that is "intensely wearing".^[31]

Rachel Brown of The Atlantic thought that, "it makes perfect sense that Colin Meloy, the loquacious and imaginative lead singer of the quirky Portland-based rock band The Decemberists, would write a children's book."^[1] In contrast, critic Anna Minard from Seattle's The Stranger and Patrick Ness, in The Guardian, feared that Wildwood could be one more of a stream of "baldly mediocre books written by celebrities", citing children's books by Joy Behar, Jerry Seinfeld, Jimmy Fallon, Gloria Estefan, and Madonna.^[7][30] Minard and Ness also worried that the book would pander to adult Decemberists fans,^[30] while only, "dressed trendily in kid-friendly wrapping," but Minrad was pleasantly astonished that the book did none of these things, and was not a "vanity project", landing well in range of its middle reader target and avoiding the affected pitfalls of a pop musician as writer.^[7] Ness, noting the repetition of the adjective "suddenly" in one paragraph, hoped for tighter writing in future novels, but overall found the book successful and not the work of a "dilettante wanting to dabble."^[30] Coincidentally, Colin Meloy's sister, novelist Maile Meloy, also released a juvenile fiction book in 2011, saying, "I feel like everyone I know is writing one."^[5]

Stephen Heyman of The New York Times warned that Wildwood might be too violent for some readers, having many of the horrors so frequently found in Decemberists songs, including battles when people and animals die by musket and cannon fire, sword blows, and falling, and references to torture, and the threat of the blood sacrifice of a baby at the book's climax.^[5]

Adaptations

In 2011, Oregon-based animation studio Laika optioned Wildwood for a stop motion feature film.^[5][32] Laika also produced the trailer for the book.^[18]

Publication history

Hardback

• 2011, USA, Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins). ISBN 978-0-06-202468-8. Pub. date August 30, 2011, Hardback.
• 2011, Harper Audio. ISBN 978-0-06-204706-9. Pub. date August 30, 2011, Unabridged audio CD. Read by Amanda Plummer.
• 2011, Australia. Penguin Group Australia. ISBN 978-0-670-07515-7. Pub. date September 28, 2011, Hardback.
• 2011, USA, Balzer + Bray and Powell's Books. ISBN 978-0-06-213028-0. Pub. date December 24, 2011. Hardback, signed special edition.
• 2012, UK. Canongate Books Ltd. ISBN 978-0-85786-324-9. Pub. date January 26, 2012. Hardback.
• 2012, Germany. Heyne Verlag (Random House). ISBN 978-3-453-26714-5. Pub. date March 5, 2012. Hardback. German translation by Astrid Finke.

E-book

• 2011, Balzer + Bray. ISBN 0-06-202468-X. Pub. date August 30, 2011, Kindle.
• 2011, Balzer + Bray. ISBN 978-0-06-209353-0. Pub. date August 30, 2011, Google eBooks.
• 2012, Canongate Books ISBN 978-0-85786-326-3. Pub. date January 2012, Adobe Digital.

Notes

References

External links

• Official website