Review Blog

Jul 31 2012

The children and the wolves by Adam Rapp

Candlewick Press, 2012. 152p. ISBN 978-0-7636-5337-8.
(Age: 15+ )Australia has both Sonya Hartnett and Margo Lanagan and America has DBC Pierre et al. So we shouldn't be surprised that Adam Rapp, a writer for the US drama series In Treatment (set in a psychoanalyst's office) uses alternating streams of consciousness to recount the kidnapping of a small child by a group of disturbed teenagers.
However, none of us can be prepared for some of the most poignant writing in literature since Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, wherein the eldest son in an impoverished family suicides taking his younger brothers with him and signing the note, 'Done because we are too menny.'
Conversely, Rapp's modern villain is undoubtedly a sociopath. Extremely intelligent, Bounce commands two classmates from the other side of the tracks, to do her bidding. At her instigation, Orange and the protagonist, Wiggins, partake in violent playoffs, drug taking and cavorting, but the plot centres around the group's abduction of a small child.
The little girl is chained in Orange's basement for some months because his disabled father is wheelchair bound and therefore won't find her downstairs. 'The Frog', as they refer to her, becomes expert at The children and the wolves, both a violent video game and a metaphor for her own plight. The trio use the child's disappearance to scam the public, intending to use the donations to buy a gun to kill a local poet, to whom Bounce has taken exception.
The inclusion of Bounce's college entrance essay written in the first person, raises tensions - she has killed animals before at least. When she takes exception to a social worker checking up on Orange's dysfunctional family and they attempt to murder her, Wiggins rebels to protect the innocent, presumably because he has had some nurturing at least.
Rapp's authentic inner monologues of disturbed young lives are not for school collections. But whilst Hardy's19th century readers were so horrified that he refused to write another novel, desensitized modern readers may well countenance Rapp's confronting social vivisection for our collective improvement.
Deborah Robins