Wolf Boy Book

On a frosty winter’s day, Francis—the sweet, generous, responsible eldest child of the Harrelson family—dies in a car accident on an ice-covered highway, and Wolf Boy is born.

The earth doesn’t rumble, no angels descend, and the sun doesn’t weep. Nothing, in short, to signify the deep change that each member of the Harrelson household will undergo. Parents Gene and Helen turn away from each other and look inward, losing themselves in private fantasies. Ten-year-old Crispy devises elaborate strategies for her escape from the suffocating clutch of the Harrelson home and into the waiting arms of pop star Marky Mark.

But the heart of this family portrait is younger brother Stephen, who, along with his quirky and creative friend Nicole, crafts an alternative reality in which their comic book hero, Wolf Boy, battles the forces of evil, champions the powers of good, and fights to keep his family intact. Through Wolf Boy, Stephen finds an outlet for his grief and a concrete expression for his place in a family spiraling out of control and for all the natural yearnings and hopes of a typical thirteen-year-old. Wolf Boy’s adventures are featured throughout the book, introducing a graphic-novel subplot that adds humor and visual interest and stretches the limits of the conventional novel.

With warmth, humor, hope, and empathy, Evan Kuhlman’s debut novel is truly unforgettable and signals a fresh new voice in today’s fiction.

Publishers Weekly

Gene and Helen Harrelson sleep in separate bedrooms after a car accident in an ice storm kills their oldest child, Francis, a sophomore at the local University of Illinois, Carbondale, while younger siblings Stephen and Crispy struggle to cope with the loss of their mentor. In this dysfunctional family tale, happiness escapes the characters in a "slow, persistent leak" as Kuhlman wryly dissects seemingly innocent moments, like Stephen's assumption that the stranger on the phone is a telemarketer and not the messenger of his older brother's death. Stephen, more or less at the center of the book, channels his grief into stories for a comic called The Adventures of Wolf Boy, illustrated by his charmingly odd girlfriend, Nicole, and woven beautifully throughout the novel. Wolf Boy lives in Forgotten City and grapples with the death of older brother Johnny Laredo while battling villains and trying to save the world. But while the novel offers inventive twists on the story of a boy trying to save his own world (i.e., his grieving family), Kuhlman can't quite pack everything in, so that the small and subtle opening chapters end up getting inked out. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.