The Children and the Wolves

by Adam Rapp, Timothy Ering (Illustrator)

Overview

Printz Honor-winning author Adam Rapp spins a raw, gripping, and ultimately redemptive story about three disaffected teens and a kidnapped child.

Three teenagers — a sharp, well-to-do girl named Bounce and two struggling boys named Wiggins and Orange — are holding a four-yearold girl hostage in Orange’s basement. The little girl answers to “the Frog” and seems content to play a video game about wolves all day long, a game that parallels the reality around her. As the stakes grow higher and the guilt and tension mount, Wiggins cracks and finally brings Frog to a trusted adult. Not for the faint of heart, Adam Rapp’s powerful, mesmerizing narrative ventures deep into psychological territory that few dare to visit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780763653378
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	02/28/2012
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.14(w) x 7.87(h) x 0.67(d)
Lexile:	HL630L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Adam Rapp is the acclaimed author of Punkzilla, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book; Under the Wolf, Under the Dog,a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist and winner of the Schneider Family Book Award; and 33 Snowfish, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. He is also an accomplished playwright, a writer for Season Three of the HBO series In Treatment, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama in 2007. Adam Rapp lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Writing in the visceral narrative style readers have come to expect from him, Rapp (Punkzilla) plunges readers into the minds of three emotionally disturbed teens and the four-year-old girl they have kidnapped and keep chained up in a basement. The driving force behind the trio’s actions is intelligent and cold-blooded 14-year-old Bounce, who tests the limits of her power by manipulating insecure Wiggins and violent Orange into being her pawns, “my perfect little monkey boys,” feeding them prescription drugs, toying with them sexually, and making them fight each other. The three collect donations for the girl’s disappearance with the aim of buying a Glock to kill an elderly poet. Only Wiggins’s struggling conscience stands in the way of Bounce’s bloodlust. Bigotry, neglect, violence, and desensitization to all of the above intermingle in a story that’s particularly devoid of hope, even for Rapp. Even four-year-old Frog seems beyond salvation, as she obsessively plays a violent video game that isn’t any more disturbing than what’s going on in the rest of the book. It’s an unrelentingly bleak indictment of a world far gone, where the best—perhaps only—option is to abandon society altogether. Ages 14–up. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Readers should know the kind of grueling, soulful, gut-punching work to expect from Rapp. Still, be warned: this is his most hellish - and hellishly readable - vision yet...he's also creating, book by book, a vital library of the furies and hopes of a forgotten underclass, and always in their own confused, desperate, and endlessly resourceful voices...few YA authors are so consistently lauded. Multiple copies may be required.
—Booklist (starred review)

Rapp's poetic use of language makes for a brutally beautiful read... The author continues to push the boundaries of fiction for teens by providing an unrelentingly real and intensely powerful voice for the disenfranchised youth who dangle on society's edge, forgotten until they commit random acts of violence because they have been shown no other way. Hard to read, impossible to forget.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The raw and edgy story line and language have a powerful impact, and the novel will deservedly find an appreciative audience. Give this one to mature fans of books like Joanne Harris’s Blueeyedboy and Sapphire’s Push.
—School Library Journal

Rapp creates distinct voices for the four characters, and, as off-putting as the subject is, the tale has a frenzied power. In a world where parents do leave their children to the wolves, and where television, the mall, video games, and drugs are more seductive than anything school has to offer, such deeds don't seem so unthinkable. Rapp captures a world that might just be right down the street.
—The Horn Book

Rapp paints a bleak and deeply disturbing portrait of the soullessness of contemporary adolescence, from the casual racism that pervades the book’s language to its obsessive attention to the grotesque and visceral.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

This novel is tough, difficult, and disturbing yet still compulsively page-turning.
—VOYA

THE CHILDREN AND THE WOLVES will forever have an effect on you and your heart.
—The Denver Post

From the Publisher

Two wayward teens fall under the evil thrall of a third in this disturbing tale by the Printz Honor–winning author of Punkzilla (2009). Fourteen-year-old amoral honors student Bounce convinces two socially challenged and drug-addicted seventh graders, Wiggins and Orange, to kidnap a 3-year-old girl and imprison her in Orange's basement. Then the three manufacture posters of the girl they have dubbed the Frog and use them to collect "donations" for the missing child. In reality, Bounce is saving up to buy a gun, which she intends to use on a local author who offended her during a class visit. Orange is all in, but sensitive Wiggins, who imagines his soul as "a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest," begins to question the plan, especially when Bounce hints that the Frog's time is running out. Though the slim novel's premise is profoundly unsettling, Rapp's poetic use of language makes for a brutally beautiful read. There is a drug dealer with "a face like a rubber shark" and buildings that "look perfect, like they got baked in a oven with some brownies." The author continues to push the boundaries of fiction for teens by providing an unrelentingly real and intensely powerful voice for the disenfranchised youth who dangle on society's edge, forgotten until they commit random acts of violence because they have been shown no other way. Hard to read, impossible to forget. (Fiction. 14 & up)

Kirkus Reviews

Gr 10 Up—Bounce, 14, is on a path of horrifying behavior. Her wealthy parents are in the pharmaceutical business, are rarely home, and pay little attention to their sociopathic daughter. Bounce has endless access to drugs like Oxycontin, and she uses them to attract and control male sidekicks Orange and Wiggins. Both come from poverty and troubled homes; Orange is the more willing of the two. When Bounce gets angry at a visiting poet in her Honors English class, she decides to seek revenge through a complicated scheme that involves kidnapping a toddler and some disturbing violence. This book is reminiscent of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (Random, 1965), only it involves middle school students. It has a healthy infusion of cringe-worthy scenes and a cavalier attitude toward sex. Wiggins is the only character who seems to have any conscience at all, but he is not enough to make readers feel good about this novel. But that is not the author's intention. The raw and edgy story line and language have a powerful impact, and the novel will deservedly find an appreciative audience. Give this one to mature fans of books like Joanne Harris's Blueeyedboy (Doubleday, 2010) and Sapphire's Push (Knopf, 1996).—Jake Pettit, Thompson Valley High School, Loveland, CO

School Library Journal

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