Wildwood (Wildwood Chronicles #1) by Colin Meloy
2/5 star rating **
Premise – (3/5) I honestly didn’t know what to expect from Wildwood. I saw it at the Book Mobile and picked it up a couple times, so I finally brought it home. Prue and her friend Curtis embark on a rescue mission for her littler brother, and then get caught up in the politics and shenanigans of Wildwood. I came into this book pretty open-minded.
Characters – (3/5) I liked Prue, and I liked Curtis too, except they never really addressed the fact that he probably helped kill some of the Bandits before he switched sides?? That was sort of an issue for me. But they were both mostly likable, and there was a colorful cast of side characters. I had some issues with Alexandra (you know, besides the fact that she was a murderer), which I’ll discuss below. But I liked Brendan and the Bandits, Iphigenia and the Mystics (bonus points for a classics name), and the other people and animals Prue and Curtis encountered. Though I liked the characters for the most part, none of them fully captured my attention or affection.
Plot – (2.5/5) Okay, so I liked the ending a lot. The final battle was well done. And I liked a lot of the early journey too, but the middle dragged on. It felt unnecessarily long and I found myself getting a little bored. There was a lot going on, and for a while there wasn’t really an end in sight and I couldn’t tell where the plot was going. Sometimes, that’s a good thing, but not in the case of Wildwood, in my opinion. Nice beginning and end, but I struggled with the middle.
World – (2.5/5) On one hand, I like the idea of the Impassable Wilderness. And I liked the idea of Wildwood a lot too, and thought having the North and South Wood be so different was a great twist. I liked the various politics of all the different regions. But here’s the thing I couldn’t get over: This world is physiologically impossible. Coyotes can’t hold guns, they don’t have opposable thumbs? I’m not sure why that was such an issue for me but it was. Like the idea that animals and humans live in harmony and talk to each other is great but also, it just doesn’t work because none of the animals have thumbs…they can’t grip anything. None of this gun-firing, doorknob-turning nonsense. It is physically impossible. And that really detracted from the world for me.
Overall– (2.6/5) Though I enjoyed the book’s characters and thought it had an excellent ending, I couldn’t quite buy into the world. The brother-sister relationship was a great frame, but got a bit lost in the narrative. I also found Wildwood unnecessarily long, with a middle that dragged. Plus, I had a handful of issues with the writing. All in all, Wildwood just wasn’t for me.