Carol Rifka Brunt

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

It is 1987, and only one person has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus -- her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss.  Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend.  So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June's world is turned upside down.  But Finn's death brings a surprise acquaintance into June's life -- someone who will help her to heal, and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.

a novel

Tell the wolves I'm home

I love when a recommendation from a random place turns out to be possibly the best book you have read during the year. Because wow, I cannot believe the hold this book had on me. It was nearly impossible for me to put it down.

Compelling and emotionally devastating story under deseptively simple and straightforward writing. It is hard to believe this is the author's debut - the prose is polished and confident, always in their control. I cannot sing its praises enough.

Also to note, I understand that I have a little different reading of June's feelings towards Finn. Personally, when the novel calls it love and being in love, I understand it as falling within that space in adolescence where all affection is convoluted. That is to say, I do not really take it as a romantic or incestious feeling. Finn was simply the most important person in her life, her quasi-infatuation with him and her obsession with him also leading to idolation. My reading of it was as a much more complex feeling than what the discourse seems to focus on. Maybe that is why this did not get in the way of my enjoying and loving the novel so much.

I love when a recommendation from a random place turns out to be possibly the best book you have read during the year. Because wow, I cannot believe the hold this book had on me. It was nearly impossible for me to put it down.

Compelling and emotionally devastating story under deseptively simple and straightforward writing. It is hard to believe this is the author's debut - the prose is polished and confident, always in their control. I cannot sing its praises enough.

Also to note, I understand that I have a little different reading of June's feelings towards Finn. Personally, when the novel calls it love and being in love, I understand it as falling within that space in adolescence where all affection is convoluted. That is to say, I do not really take it as a romantic or incestious feeling. Finn was simply the most important person in her life, her quasi-infatuation with him and her obsession with him also leading to idolation. My reading of it was as a much more complex feeling than what the discourse seems to focus on. Maybe that is why this did not get in the way of my enjoying and loving the novel so much.

This was definitely a great read. Refreshing even. If you have a sister who always seems to be a bit distant from you without explaining the reason then this will speak to you. I just wished that there was more realizations coming from June which clearly marked her journey in understanding herself. Not that it was it was drag because it didn’t include this, but I felt that it was missing a key piece to the story. I cried when Toby explained how him and Finn met. 

Evan Carter

this book goes to the 'keeping it close to my heart' imaginary bookshelf.

Jeannette Ordas

I really enjoyed the sister story in this book and wished it was a little more developed. 3.5 stars but nudged up to 4 stars because tears.

Arturo Hernández

This novel narrates the life of a teenager who goes through the death of her uncle due to AIDS, as well as the consequences of a lot of his choices on her family. It’s situated on the US 80’s and it gives a lot of context as to how was it for society to understand and accept other communities at that time. At a little over 300 pages it’s really an easy read that takes advantage of the coming of age story it presents to connect with the audience, talk about sisterhood and family issues. If anything I just wish the spotlight was bigger on Finn’s and Toby’s relationship, though I appreciate the approach the author took with the sisters’ storyline.

Alexandra Sklar

Read this the day before my Kindle library loan expired, and so glad I did! A story about two generations of sibilings, losing and finding each other. Sad in parts, but also warming.

Janice Hopper

Maybe I'm too old to appreciate this book. O.o

It reads to me like an object lesson in how not to be honest with yourself and other people. There is SO LITTLE COMMUNICATION between people in this book. I really got kinda frustrated with it, especially as it got close to the end. A lot of the problems could have been resolved much more easily if people just talked to each other here.

So, alas, only 3 stars. And disappointment for me.

Elizabeth Moore

I loved this book. If I ever am to write one, this is the kind of story I hope I’ll tell. I had no idea it was going to, but this book just broke open my heart so gently, and made me never want to finish reading it. The way life is described, the way hearts are described, they way that so much value is given to small little lives until you realize you were foolish for thinking they were little at all. I absolutely loved it and am amazed by how this writer worked so much heart and world and expansion into such a small domestic world. I loved every single aspect of how this thing was written and it’s one of a tiny, tiny treasure trove of stories I’d be happy to read on repeat for the rest of my life.

Melanie Richards

4.5 stars. The repetitive passages about love for Finn felt a bit hollow to me (maybe I just had trouble relating), but Finn was less a character in himself and more a device to bring out the lovely and complicated dynamics between the rest of the characters. The relationship between sisters, to me, was the most realistic and by that token, meaningful. The ending, however, does an elegant job of tying all these various relationships together. Well done.

Cindy Lieberman

So slow! I almost gave up a few times but hung in there because of some reviewers I respect. Takes place in the early 80s when little was known about AIDS, yet the book misses an opportunity to say much about the families of AIDS sufferers who worked tirelessly to redefine stereotypes and to help remove the then-widespread fear of contact with people who were living (and dying) with AIDS. That being said, this isn't a book about AIDS. It's about families, choices, missed opportunities and things unsaid. It is a sweet book with some beautiful writing, despite its slow pace and the overall thick-headedness of all the characters.

Robin M Cabana

I'm a few years younger than Carol Rifka Brunt's character June - so my memories of the 80s are very different. I wasn't really aware of AIDS in 1987 and I take for granted that we've come so far in terms of acceptance and understanding.

I really related to June in many ways - I never felt like I fit in either. I did question why her parents didn't notice their phone bill - but I guess they were busy people and didn't really see what June or their other daughter, Greta, were up to at all. The strained relationships and things that went unsaid made me sad. There are lots of bittersweet moments in this book, but it really is a great story about family and friendship.

I also like books set in places where I've been, and aside from NYC, most of the book takes place in Westchester County, where I worked for years.

Kelsi Proulx

This book was great. One of the first books I have read in quite a while that really made me think. Its a story of growing up and learning what love is. About how we never truly know who someone is even if we love them and think we know everything about them. About judgement and how dangerous it is. I definitely recommend this one.

There's only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that's her uncle, the renowned painter, Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her once inseparable older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confident, and best friend. So when he dies far too young of a mysterious illness that June’s mother can barely bring herself to discuss, June's world is turned upside down. At the funeral, she notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd, and a few days later, June receives a package in the mail. Inside is a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn's apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. A the two begin to spend time together, June realises she's not the only one who misses Finn, and if she can bring herself to trust this unexpected friend, he might just be the one she needs the most. Tell the Wolves I'm Home is a tender story of love lost and found, an unforgettable portrait of the way compassion can make us whole again.

Summer Stanley

This was a solid 4 star book the whole time, but the ending - holy cow. Incredible. 

June and Toby are amazing. Greta’s development added so much depth to everyone’s else characters. The family dynamics felt honest and real. 
I loved this.

Melody Izard

About loving the wrong person. The wobbliness of love. Working at something you don't love. Not wanting to grow up. Giving up on a dream. Jealousy. And of course, it's about AIDS.

Gorgeous. Definitely one of my favorites.

Dorian Avers

** spoiler alert **
            This novel was a mix of a baby Fiona's perspective from "The Great Believers" and "my grandmother asked me to tell you she's sorry". 
 3.75 I'm having a really hard time rating this novel. I don't know exactly what it was missing, but it was missing something. I think the perspective of a niece watching her beloved uncle and then his boyfriend who has become her best friend die from AIDS is an interesting choice of perspective. My problem with June's narration is that even though she's fourteen she's written much younger and that bothered me from time to time. She's a little strange and that's alright, but even the weird (not a bad thing) kids have friends and I guess that was one of the unrealistic parts. Also, her relationship with her mother and Greta. I've yet to see an author who can realistically portray and write dialogue for both children and adults. They're only good at one and this was something that frustrated me. Danni is a mother, a sister, and a wife and I like that the author wrote her so that you could see those different relationships. It makes sense that she can be petty and immature when things come to Finn because they're siblings, but then she turns around and is nasty to June just like Greta would be I thought it was poorly done. 
 I was interested in this novel and it did make me tear up, but towards the end I thought it was unlikely and preachy. Throughout the book it had one of my big pet peeves constantly. I dislike when characters are like, "I made this decision and I knew that it was exactly what so-and-so would've wanted", like I just want them to be wrong once, no one's a mind reader. I liked that there was an interview with Brunt at the end, but for some reason it made me like her less. I really don't know why I didn't like this book as much as everyone else did. It wasn't bad, it was good, but it didn't blow me away. 
 I just read the summary and there's no mention of AIDS or Toby being Finn's boyfriend and I don't know how to feel about it. They say Finn dies "of a mysterious illness her(June's) mother can barely speak about" and I think that is exactly what an ignorant person in the 80's would've said. I wonder if Brunt wrote it that way so close-minded people, who would not otherwise pick up an LGBTQ+ book, would pick up this one and see the characters as humans and connect with their pain and relationships before they could form nasty opinions. Or was it easier and more "family-friendly" to market it this way? It just doesn't sit right.

Dina

This book has been out for quite a while now, and I'd added it to the list of books I wanted to read at some point in my life, but it had been so long (years!) since I did that, by the time I finally grabbed a copy of it, I didn't even know what it was about anymore.

The summary intrigued me, though, so I gave it a chance and walked into it blind. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But in a good way.

This is the story of quite some people going through quite a lot of things at the same time, stumbling their way through loss and finding meaning in things. It's the realizing that you grow older and things will never be the same, but they could change into something better if you care enough to mold them. And it's about love. Many different kinds of love.

I thought of all the different kinds of love in the world. I could think of ten without even trying. The way parents love their kids, the way you love a puppy or chocolate ice cream or home or your favorite book or your sister.

There were moments when I felt like slapping some characters, I'm not gonna lie about that. However, I lost count of the times I wanted to just hug them. Everything was so intense and messy and sad and so overwhelmingly human...

You may not agree with some of the decisions being made by these characters, but you can understand why they do what they do. You can tell that it comes from all their different kinds of mourning. You have people mourning people's deaths but also people mourning lost connections and they're both extremely sad and relatable.

In the end, this book threw me (and my emotions) for a loop and squeezed my heart in a way that I couldn't help but to leek my feelings all over the place. This book has definitely made it onto the list of my favorite books.

SnarkByThePage

An engaging story and characters...nice social commentary...worth the read.

b.andherbooks

An odd tale about a young girl, her dead uncle, and her family life. The protagonist reminds me a bit of the one from The Perks of a Being a Wallflower; she doesn't want to stand out, but ends up doing so anyways.

Rebecca Light

I can hardly begin to describe how this book has affected me. I stayed up until 2 am to finish it last night and had to stifle my tears so I wouldn't wake my fiance. It's simply one of the most, if not THE most, beautiful story I have ever read about love and adolescence and loss and family and tolerance. Mostly love. Please please read this gorgeous novel.

Christina Hufford

(You can also read this review on my blog here.)

What I Liked

Tell The Wolves I'm Home is an easy (if a bit slow) read, and certainly one that's very emotional. There were times when this book made me cry hard. The tragedy of Toby's character could get overwhelming; he was kept a secret by his boyfriend, as per June's mother's request -- so whenever Finn's nieces came to visit, Toby had to go somewhere else, pretend like his apartment wasn't his home, hide away until it was safe to return. When Finn dies of AIDS, the only person who knew or cared Toby existed is gone, but Toby's still dying too. The sheer oppression homophobia has caused in this man's life became suffocating towards the end of the book, and I just couldn't stop crying. It was so unfair, and some of these characters were so full of hate. So, emotionally, the book is very affecting.

I actually think this was the book's strongest point for me, surpassing even the story itself. The characters are more or less forgettable, but that suffocating feeling of people were treated like this and it wasn't right really helps the novel worm its way into the reader's heart. Paragraphs like this, about a news broadcast on AZT, particularly me hit hard:

They segued into a more general piece about AIDS. As usual, they started out with footage of some kind of sweaty nightclub in the city with a bunch of gay men dancing around in stupid leather outfits. I couldn't even begin to imagine Finn dancing the night away like some kind of half-dressed cowboy. It would have been nice if for once they showed some guys sitting in their living rooms drinking tea and talking about art or movies or something If they showed that, then maybe people would say, "Oh, okay, that's not so strange."

That kind of attitude, representing gay people by an overly sexualized stereotype, is exactly what homophobic media does to distort the image, to get people sitting at home to think of gay people as belonging in some kind of other category. It's the same thing they do to women who dress or act in ways that embrace their sexuality. They become "sluts" and "whores", labels which denote these women from the category of human beings to something lower, some other that makes it okay to denigrate and abuse them. While the novel doesn't extrapolate on this subject or go down this path very far, it was nice to see this basic idea "treat gay people as PEOPLE" put into text. 

What I Didn't Like

This was a slow book, and occasionally it felt like the story was plodding forward without any great clue of where it was going. I think it could've been fifty to a hundred pages shorter easily. The story is told through anecdotes, and while this is a matter of preference, I feel like stories told this way always tend to ramble towards their conclusion rather than roll towards it head-on.

There were also times when the antagonist characters, June's sister and mother, were so obtusely cruel that it became unpleasant for the reader. And the plot kind of fizzles out and becomes overly complicated towards the end; you just want June to stand up for herself. She's so eloquent and worldly in her narration, but the way she interacts with other characters is frustratingly juvenile. I know it's June's book, but I think if Toby had been the main character, I would've liked this book even more, as he was its most tragic figure, and most interesting character. Besides Finn, of course.

Also, this isn't a complaint about the writing at all, but this book was poorly edited. Nearly every page had a sentence or two without a space after the period, or dialogue without punctuation; there was one instance where a character said two sentences, but it was separated into two different lines of dialogue, making it look like the other character in the scene had spoken, even though that made no sense. That was the Number 1 thing that kept pulling me out of the book. The frustrating characters were supposed to be frustrating, June was supposed to be socially uncomfortable, so those frustrations I could lend to the story creating the appropriate atmosphere, but the crappy copy editing kept yanking me out of the submersion like a hand gripping my hair and pulling me out of of the pool. And so much of this problem could've been fixed with a freakin' Microsoft Word Grammar Check, it's amazing so many mistakes were allowed all the way into print.

Final Thoughts

While I did have some problems with the flow of the book (the middle got very slow) and at times the story felt a little too juvenile (an impression exacerbated by the lazy editing), I would definitely recommend you give this book a read. It's a touching story about a young girl and a man dying of AIDS coming together to take care of each other, and I think the sentiment and underlying (if overwhelming) emotions carry the book beyond the silly typing mistakes and occasionally weak characters. Basically, if you want to remind yourself why it's important to be kind and non-judgmental and good to other people, and you feel like making yourself cry, give this book a read.

Rating

4 stars out of 5

Laura

I didn't think I would like this book. And I admit, it took me awhile to get into. I wasn't crazy about the main character, June, since she seemed kind of like your typical precocious child character (despite being like 14). 

And then, when I was roughly like 50 pages in, Toby made his entrance. And the book started to improve dramatically. I kind of fell in love (though not romantically, if that makes sense) with Toby. He was so sweet and earnest and he cared so much about trying to make things work with June because Finn loved June and he loved Finn, and I just found him such an endearing character. Around this time, too, I found myself warming up to all of the characters, and fascinated by this family drama unfolding. The relationship between Greta and June, between Finn and Dani, and especially between Finn and Toby, as well as Finn and June. I also liked how real June's family felt. June and her sister had a believable relationship, and I loved how both June's parents (especially her father- fathers too often get villainized for no reason in YA works) also seemed like they genuinely were trying to be the best parents they could to their children. 

The actual subject matter also intrigued me. I've always held a fascination- I suppose you could call it that- with gay culture, especially in the 20th century and especially in the 80s and 90s. And the AIDS epidemic is something that couldn't have been ignored during that time. I believe that that disease is the reason the Gay Rights Movement made little progress until 2000s. During the 70s, the movement was picking up and gaining tons of support, and there were many celebrities who, while they still couldn't really be out and proud, were a lot more open about their homosexuality as they had been in decades past, and for many it was basically an open secret- I'm talking Truman Capote, Halston, Andy Warhol, etc. And then AIDS showed up and the public freaked out and because it began in the gay community (and there it claimed the majority of its victims) gay men were basically blamed for the disease. And, before I get angry comments, I'm not saying that all gay men have AIDS or that they're to blame or that only they can get AIDS. I'm merely stating facts about a conception that was commonly held during the time period. I could go on, but the point is that it was a horrific disease. My mother worked at an ER in a nearby major city and has so many stories to tell about drug addicted prostitutes with AIDS or other colorful characters showed up over the night shift, and remembers the strict protocols put in place about things like nosebleeds, something that used to be an easy fix but because of AIDS became a hell of a lot more dangerous-seeming than they ever were before. 

I could go on and on, but the point is, I think the reason why I latched onto that particular era in gay history is because of the tragedy surrounding it. I am attracted to tragedy in history; it's far more interesting than periods of prosperity. This all comes back to Tell the Wolves I'm Home because if there's one complaint I have, it's that Brunt seemed to have sugarcoated this disease. Even the parts at the end weren't really as horrible as AIDS really was- the disease basically attacked everything in your body. Still, that didn't stop me from enjoying this book. But other than that, the pain that surrounded this disease felt so real to me that I was surprised that the author had no personal connection to the disease, no friends or relatives (perhaps a brother) that died from it. Frankly, that's talent. I've read books by authors who have close connections to things like cancer or what have you and they still can't quite master the emotions surrounding these illnesses. Also, I liked how Brunt didn't use HIV and AIDS interchangeably. 

Continue reading this review on my blog here: http://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/20...

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

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