In National Book Award finalist Amber McBride's ambitious middle-grade novel, Gone Wolf, a child develops an imagined world to escape the painful realities of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As Imogen tells it, she is Inmate Eleven, a Blue girl living in the Bible Boot in 2111, who is locked up with nothing but educational tools and her pet wolf for company. In Imogen's real life, she is a 12-year-old Black girl living in Charlottesville, Va., in 2022 who struggles with agoraphobia, anxiety, and grief. "Sometimes," Dr. Lovingood, her "mind doctor," says to her, "stories tell us something true even if the story is not all the way true." Imogen's fantasy helps the girl explain to herself--and her therapist--how hard the world can be. Slowly, she discovers how many people throughout history have fought to try to make the world better.
McBride (Me, Moth; We Are All So Good at Smiling), who here fascinatingly blends genres and incorporates poetry and found documents, does not shy from topics that bite: racism, ableism, anxiety, grief, and racial trauma are all at the forefront of this middle-grade debut. Gone Wolf presents its dual narrative in cleaved halves, which, while intriguing, leads to occasional pacing issues as readers move between Imogen's harrowing imagined world and her real life. Nonetheless, McBride has created a fully realized work of science fiction that ends too soon, a novel that falls between the dystopian worldbuilding of The City of Ember and the impressively frightening mind of Jordan Peele. --Nicole Brinkley, bookseller and writer