Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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It takes time for me to review this book because it's just hard to form any coherent sentences to do this book justice.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home is beautiful in every sense I could muster. It's heartbreaking. It's poignant.



Yes, I have to admit that I was reluctant to start reading this book because books of this genre just either works really well for me, or it goes to the polar opposite and makes me want to go and flip the table. It certainly has hit the nail on the former.

By the time I started reading, I couldn't put this book down at all. The inner mind of June is captivating-- it's twisted in its own rights, as just everyone else's in the book. As just everyone else's in the world. It's realistic because humans love. And my friend, we all know how great and terribly beautiful love is. It forces you to succumb to greed, envy, jealousy and other seven sins of sorts.

In a way, Tell the Wolves I'm Home is a bildungsroman. A coming age of story for a girl that has to cope with death and the travesty of life, because eventually every kid need to realise how fucked up life is.

But no, that's not the whole ordeal of this book because that would make this book completely pessimistic and depressing. Carol Rifka Brunt astutely highlights that despite of the tragedy life brings to you, you can't deny it's poignant. It's beautiful in every sense, even in tragedy, and you can't help but wishing to live more and to love more. It's not the world, per se, it's the people in it.

No matter how warped a person can be, this book shows that they're not without their share of goodness in them. No one is truly evil, and no one is devastatingly ugly. They are all flawed and yet beautiful in their own ways and you learn to love them. That, my fellow readers, is the profound life lesson June learned throughout this book and at the same time rings true to ourselves.

By the end of this book, I've fallen in love with every single characters in the book and I've come to the conclusion that Carol Rifka Brunt is a wordsmith, and a master at it.

Five out of five stars.

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