Kit's Wilderness Book

"Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light."

Kit's Wilderness is an eerie, dreamlike novel, permeating with a feeling of sadness and loss. It is, at times, a rather dark book - as I was reading it I was reminded of Robert Cormier's work, though his novels are definitely much darker and ultimately depressing, whereas Kit's Wilderness is ultimately hopeful and beautiful.

The novel begins with 13 year old Christopher - "Kit" - Watson moving with his parents back to their hometown of Stoneygate, a small, former mining town in the northeast of England to care for his recently widowed grandfather. At school he is approached by a boy named John Askew, who recognizes him as being a part of "the old families" - families of coal miners who worked in mines which once operated beneath the city. Although the mines have been closed for a long time, they prove to be a source of fascination for the local children - Watson introduces Kit to a game called "death", where one of the participants is chosen to "die" by spinning a knife, and has to spend time in a dark pit- recreating the accident of 1821, where more than a hundred of Stoneygate's children died in mining tunnels in a pit disaster, including Kit's own great-grandfather. Although the game at first is just grim and dark entertainment, Kit soon starts seeing it as something more profound and even mystical: a way to bond with the long-lost children.

Kit's Wilderness is a truly delightful little novel which I enjoyed reading very much, thanks to David Almond's ability to create a compelling, multilayered story. Although the book is marketed towards younger readers, I think it can - and should! - be readers of all ages. Almond writers very well - although Stoneygate does not exist in reality, it is modeled on the many northern mining towns that he has known since his childhood in the county of Tyne and Wear. The eponymous wilderness does not relate only to the wild landscape surrounding the town. I like to see this wilderness - strange time between childhood and adulthood, where we're neither: we are not little children anymore, but we're clearly not adults yet. We're in the wild, discovering new things, often without anyone to guide us, like the children of this novel: we devour stories and long to experience them, and make our own. I loved how David Almond presented the relationship between Kit and his ailing grandfather, slowly succumbing to dementia. As he shares the stories of his own youth and the town's past, Kit's grandpa is slowly drifting away into darkness; he shares the past with his grandson as much as he himself is moving towards it, unavoidably. As his personality is slowly eroded by alzheimer's, his stories influence and help form Kit's own character and influence his life and decisions that he will make.

Kit's Wilderness is a surprisingly tender and touching book, with bits of real beauty in it; I can safely recommend it to pretty much anyone, and I will definitely be reading more of David Almond's work in the future.