Reviews with content warning for Incest - Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Reviews tagging 'Incest'

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

11 reviews

parasolcrafter's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional inspiring sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

oh...this book truly is wonderful; its so sad yet so beautiful and full of hope. its a tragedy through and through - of everyone losing finn, of june losing toby - but its full of such love that it doesnt feel as heartbreaking as it could. and the love really is so rich in this book. june loves finn - i do have my issues with that, but i understand why she feels what she feels - and finn and toby loved each other and danni loved her brother and she loves her children and june loves greta and finn loved everyone and love...its everywhere in this book, for both the good and the bad. its the fuel for this book and the characters and it makes this book what it is. and thats why it hurts so much because love only does so much, only goes so far and then when you can no longer love that person it goes - where? you have to keep it inside yourself because the love you have one person is for them; you cant put it on someone else. so you keep it inside and you hold it close the way you held the person you loved close. and like...god. i could wax poetic about this book forever. its just so good. and the title...it hurts because at first to me it meant that june could tell the wolves about finn, she could tell that hes home but by the end of the book is dead, the wolves are dead, and now the wolves can tell finn that june is home. like...god. pain.

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lvjy's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

There is something so completely raw about this book that really caught me off guard.

The way June talks about her uncle, and Toby to an extent, made me deeply uncomfortable but i’m willing to be a bit forgiving because i remember being fourteen and having a messy family where i didn’t get to see people for years and that was a weird time. but it’s definitely something that marked the book down for me.

depiction of the aids crisis, however, and the way that it affected the people involved was beautiful in a terrible way. my heart breaks for those who we lost and whose stories have died with them.

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kileyglispie's review against another edition

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3.75

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madanxiety's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The most impressive aspect of this book in my opinion is the strength of the narration and characterization, particularly in their faithfulness to the character's ages. June had such a present voice; it truly felt like hearing a teenager's thought process, but not just any teenager - a very unique, and lonely girl. The way she rationalized things and her self-consciousness and shame resonated with my own teenage experience.

Even though I really loved the way the novel captured siblinghood, jealousy, loneliness, grief, and adolescence, I do have some problems with it.

Spoiler

For one, June's crush on Finn disturbed me from the beginning. I was hoping it was just a weird detail, but it ended up being pretty central to the plot. I just found that so... bizarre. Sure, I suppose it's in the realm of possibility, especially for such an isolated girl, but it just left a bad taste in my mouth, especially when Toby began relating it to his gayness. It perpetuates this Freudian idea that gay people are "deviants" or perverse in the same way that incestuous people are. I think it's pretty safe to say that being gay is far more common than being in love with your relative, so I thought it was a bit weird (to say the least) that the novel seems to put them on an even playing field.

Honestly, I leave the novel a little disturbed at the fact that it has essentially convinced me that sometimes it's okay 1) to fall in love with your uncle, and 2) for a strange adult and a teenager to meet and drink and smoke together behind the backs of their parents. It's a well-told story, but are these things not troubling?

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melodyseestrees's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

June's crush on her gay uncle, and later his boyfriend, was not handled super well. Every adult in her life pretended to not see it or treated it in a very "oh ho ho she'll grow out of it" way. This inappropriate crush on adult figures is a way neglected children reach out for attention. As June and her sister are left to their own devices during tax season you can really see where the susceptibility to substance abuse (alcohol and cigarettes) and need for adult attention comes from. This acceptance/ignorance of the crush gives the story an incest or 'attraction to minors' feel when it was June primarily reaching out for romantic attention and the adults around her redirecting her but not outright rejecting her.

Spoiler

There is a scene where she kisses an adult on the mouth or fantasizes about doing so. June pretends Toby is her lover when she takes him from the hospital via taxi to her home, where he dies.

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kuchshabd's review against another edition

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mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.0

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readingbooksbcwhynot123's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This was truly an...interesting book, is probably the right choice of words. I really did like it. I could barely let go of it, because it was so intriguing. A little disturbing and off putting, yes, but I read this book at 14 and I say that I could definitely relate to the mindset of a young person, especially since she was my age. Beautiful book, truly.

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impeachnixon's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

I'm writing this review years and years after I read it, so it won't be very detailed or anything, but it's taken me this logn to form my thoughts on it (and I still don't really know how I feel). All I can say is that I'm incredibly torn. I read this book when I was a 15 year old girl, and I was immediately put off by certain elements of it. In one scene, June calls Toby her boyfriend (as a "joke"? I didn't get it then and I don't get it now) and he isn't put off by it. There's the one scene where he, like, breathes down her neck? It made me extremely uncomfortable as a young girl. I don't need books that feature such complicated and controversial topics to explicitly spell out that they are bad, but, at the same time, I felt EXTREMELY uncomfortable at just how un-challenged some of these scenes went, especially as someone who was similar in age at the time to the main character. There were also many instances where June spoke about her love in language that was transparently meant to parallel the gay experience-- talking about how it isn't a love she chose, etc. That, plus one of the most prominent gay male characters (in my opinion) crossing the line in this book really made me feel like this book was not having the conversations about homophobia or incest that it wanted to be having, and that it was drawing extremely questionable comparisons between the two. I didn't need it to so explicitly condemn any of the character's actions or feelings-- I think that the reader should be trusted to form their own opinions about the events in the book. Besides, if Toby didn't act the way he did and didn't allow June to say and do some of the things she said and did, I have no problem with the book depicting and exploring the feelings that June had for her uncle. Honestly, I think my biggest complaint is just that I was lead to believe the book was in the young adult age range. The cover design, the synopsis advertising that it's about a 14 year old girl, and the synopsis not mentioning that she has feelings for her uncle had all kind of contributed to this idea for me. I still can't tell if it's YA or not-- although I hope it isn't intended to be. I can't really let myself give it under 3 stars because I did really enjoy reading certain parts of it. I think it was really well written, I loved June's relationship with her sister being explored. Although I wish that it was explored in a different way (namely, Toby handling June's feelings better and not having lines that seem to compare incest to homosexuality), the themes explored in this book and the relationships depicted were interesting and impactful. This book brought a lot of conversations that are very uncomfortable to the forefront. Still, I can't get over how uncomfortable it made me to read this book as a girl similar in age to the protagonist. For years, I've struggled to put together my feelings on this book, but I think that's my basic review. I felt like it was well written (although not flawless), but, in my personal experience, it was not tactful enough to make someone in the same demographic as the main character have a comfortable reading experience. And it wasn't always uncomfortable in the sense that it challenged me (although, to its credit, this book did challenge me in a way that I think is productive and conducive to the conversation it wanted to start). Rather, it often made me uncomfortable in the sense that I felt like I was supposed to like and relate to characters who didn't make me feel safe. I don't know how many stars off that warrants, if any. All I know is that it's one of the strongest memories I have of reading a book in that time of my life, and, although i don't know exactly what feelings I have about this book, they are no doubt very strong feelings.

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talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

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The writing itself is beautiful and the characters are interesting enough, but the weird incest tones (and a vague inclination that that is going to move toward an extremely shitty "forbidden love" comparison to gay relationships, which might be me being hypervigilant but, from a glance over other reviews, does seem to crop up) and dubious handling of HIV/AIDS-related topics is making me think it would probably be better to drop this earlier than later.

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tetedump's review against another edition

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emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

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