Wild Bird

Wendelin Van Draanen — 2017

From the award-winning author of The Running Dream and Flipped comes a remarkable portrait of a girl who has hit rock bottom but begins a climb back to herself at a wilderness survival camp. 3:47 a.m. That’s when they come for Wren Clemmens. She’s hustled out of her house and into a waiting car, then a plane, and then taken on a forced march into the desert. This is what happens to kids who’ve gone so far off the rails, their parents don’t know what to do with them anymore. This is wilderness therapy camp. Eight weeks of survivalist camping in the desert. Eight weeks to turn your life around. Yeah, right. The Wren who arrives in the Utah desert is angry and bitter, and blaming everyone but herself. But angry can’t put up a tent. And bitter won’t start a fire. Wren’s going to have to admit she needs help if she’s going to survive. "I read Wild Bird in one long mesmerized gulp. Wren will break your heart—and then mend it." —Nancy Werlin, National Book Award finalist for The Rules of Survival "Van Draanen’s Wren is real and relatable, and readers will root for her." —VOYA, starred review

Reviews

Janice Hopper@archergal

Nov 2, 2022

I'm a long way from being a rebellious teen, and even at my worst, I wasn't like Wren. Drugs, lots of anger, no decent close friends, a family she feels has let her down - yeah, Wren has Issues. When her parents give up trying to help her by themselves, they send her off to summer camp boot camp for troubled teens. In this camp there's lots of working on self-reliance, getting in touch with feelings, including feelings of rage. There's even a Magical Indian, who charms the campers with his Authentic Indian Wisdom (tm). Yeah, there's a fair amount of indigenous appropriation going on here. We really only meet one other camper, who very seriously confides to Wren her problems with heroin addiction. All the counselors are super-understanding. So yeah, it's kind of a tv version of a teenage girl's redemption story. Her whole family comes out to greet her at the end in spite of all the horrible things Wren did and said to them, because she's fixed now, right? So yeah, I'm too old for an easy redemption story. But it was reasonably well told, and I did appreciate the character learning from things like making fire with a bow drill, etc. It's one girl's story, and I hope things turned out ok when she got home. Maybe it did. There doesn't appear to be an audio version of this book here that isn't an audio CD. I listened to a digital version on Scribd.