Wild by Emily Hughes
Don’t you just love the cover of this book? I think that is why I had to read it. Inside, the text is easy to read, the illustrations are captivating but I just couldn’t feel the love. I was angry and bitter after reading this story. The whole premise of the book is that the girl is raised in the wild, for the birds taught her to sing, the bears taught her to eat, and the foxes taught her how to play. One day the humans came into the forest and found her, they took her back to civilization and tried to make her a human. Each two-page spread has a single sentence on it with a fabulous picture but it’s the adults in the book that have me shaken. The young couple who found the child in the forest was suddenly changed out in the next page, with two older adults, who from the beginning irritated me. We see the child in now in their care and on the front page of the local newspaper it states, “Famed psychiatrist takes in feral child.” The look on their faces and the lack of love and emotion is felt immediately and I am heartbroken. Their facial expressions make me want to close the book, what transpires next in the book does not surprise me. I don’t like it, why the young couple didn’t keep the child is beyond me and why the adults behaved the way they did angers me. This book is not a good one for me but I liked the illustrations and I liked the text size and fonts, which is what I based my rating on.
