The Wilderness of Girls by Madeline Claire Franklin (2024)
Let's get right to the point here. This book can easily break your heart multiple times and on multiple levels. The amount of emotional hurt on display is unrelenting and the story kept a lock on my full attention from first page to the last. The phrase 'immersive read' doesn't even begin to describe it.
The primal storyline is a trope we've all seen in books and films......that of a wild, feral child taken away from its natural habitat and brought into contact with a modern world determined to alter the child's nature, to adjust their behavior to civilized normality. Madeline Claire Franklin's remarkable debut novel presents us with a sisterhood of four such girls. living in the woods. The three teens and a tween are found by Rhi, a girl close to their own ages, working as a part time park ranger for her Uncle.
The girls' story is all at once bizarre, fantastic and heartrending - they believe they're lost Princesses from a fanciful kingdom, raised by an all-knowing, mystical mentor they knew only as 'Mother'. But to the modern world they're brought into, they can only be kidnapped, brainwashed children, whose abductor filled their minds with the elaborate fantasies he created for them to live in.
This becomes as much Rhi's story as the girls' They bond with her immediately, thinking of her as the fifth lost princess whose appearance portends a return to their mythical kingdom. And they're not far off about the 'lost' part - Rhi's Uncle has also become her guardian in the aftermath damage from her dysfunctional family. and she's internalized her own painful and terrible secrets. So it's no wonder that she finds herself gravitating to the imaginary Never Neverland the feral girls believed was true. But then the real world and the girls' entry into different foster homes, touches off no end of catastrophic events for everyone involved.
I can't say enough about the how the ambitious conception of this book impressed me. Author Franklin wisely (and cleverly) deals with a host of dire distressing issues that affect girls and women throughout the world (In both current and past history). But most importantly, she accomplishes all this while keeping a reader riveted to every twist and turn of the plot.
The primal storyline is a trope we've all seen in books and films......that of a wild, feral child taken away from its natural habitat and brought into contact with a modern world determined to alter the child's nature, to adjust their behavior to civilized normality. Madeline Claire Franklin's remarkable debut novel presents us with a sisterhood of four such girls. living in the woods. The three teens and a tween are found by Rhi, a girl close to their own ages, working as a part time park ranger for her Uncle.
The girls' story is all at once bizarre, fantastic and heartrending - they believe they're lost Princesses from a fanciful kingdom, raised by an all-knowing, mystical mentor they knew only as 'Mother'. But to the modern world they're brought into, they can only be kidnapped, brainwashed children, whose abductor filled their minds with the elaborate fantasies he created for them to live in.
This becomes as much Rhi's story as the girls' They bond with her immediately, thinking of her as the fifth lost princess whose appearance portends a return to their mythical kingdom. And they're not far off about the 'lost' part - Rhi's Uncle has also become her guardian in the aftermath damage from her dysfunctional family. and she's internalized her own painful and terrible secrets. So it's no wonder that she finds herself gravitating to the imaginary Never Neverland the feral girls believed was true. But then the real world and the girls' entry into different foster homes, touches off no end of catastrophic events for everyone involved.
I can't say enough about the how the ambitious conception of this book impressed me. Author Franklin wisely (and cleverly) deals with a host of dire distressing issues that affect girls and women throughout the world (In both current and past history). But most importantly, she accomplishes all this while keeping a reader riveted to every twist and turn of the plot.
Readers can decide for themselves about whether there's magic at play, but there's no denying there's some true storytelling magic at work here. A 'don't miss' read for this year.
(*****)
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