Wolfstongue

In a contemporary fable that draws inspiration from medieval European folklore, young Silas—bullied by cruel classmates due to an unspecified speech difficulty—is drawn into an epic adventure after he rescues an injured wolf from a band of talking foxes. The wolf, Isengrim, and his family are the last of their kind in the Forest that exists alongside Silas’s home. They’ve recently escaped Reynard and his fellow foxes, who enslaved them and other wolves in order to build a vast underground burrow called the City of Earth. Isengrim believes that Silas is their Wolfstongue, a child capable of speaking for the wolves so they can live “as wolves ought to live. Free from words,” and his voice does seem to snap the wolves out of the foxes’ influence. When Reynard’s elite guards kidnap Isengrim’s pups to start a new generation of enslaved workers, Silas joins with three archetypal animals to save them. In a children’s debut with a timeless feel, Thompson (Communion Town, for adults) considers the power of spoken language to both uplift and trap, employing sensory prose (“The wolf smelled like the scent that rises from dry ground at the end of a hot day when the rain begins to fall”) to effectively trace one child navigating pointed cruelty across species. Tromop’s realistic b&w illustrations add to the atmosphere. Human characters are presumed white. Ages 8–12. (Aug)