Wild Bird

Filling your home to bursting with anger? Or coping with someone who does? Survival in the desert might be simpler. Rarely have I ever cared so much about a character that first made me feel so intensely uncomfortable. Wren begins the story angry, dangerously smart, manipulative, and a sharp observer of her world, who sometimes turns observations backward to fit expectations. She is angry enough to make the pages seem like fire-starter. Seeing the world from her perspective is painful, illuminating, and impossible to put down. She is in a personal wilderness, and soon lands in the real physical wilderness of Utah, at wilderness therapy camp. Knowing what brought her there once felt important. I loved Wren as the story closed, but wanted Wren-agade out of my head. So I’ve thought about this book for months, considering my reaction to two versions of one person. Judging creates that difference. During her stay in the desert, a few key characters quietly accept Wren without judgement, care without conditions, and listen. They wait. Watching the result over time? Life changing for this reader. Wren’s first step onto a long, slippery slope is being lonely, and choosing unwisely when choices are few. After that step, gravity rules, and she lands a long way from anywhere planned. That first missed step could be anyone’s. So a list of how Wren went astray is unhelpful, and invites judgement better avoided. The multiple journeys Wren makes are interwoven—her route into personal wilderness, learning the Utah desert, coming to terms with herself, discovering her own way out—all are here, and detail makes each quite real. This book impels one to speed. But it is also deep and intricate, revealing people in all of their subtle complexity. The story is told in small parts, with chapters of often just three concise pages. The result is remarkably beautiful. Wild Bird has slowly trickled deep into my heart. Like water in the desert, and powerful words for personal deserts, what this book offers is vital, and worth the effort to make your own. Learn Chapter 59 by heart. It will help you avoid landing in places you never intended to go, and help you navigate.

"I'm blindfolded for what feels like an hour, jostled around on a dirt road, breathing in dust, feeling like I'm on a sketchy version of Disneyland's Raiders of the Lost Ark ride. Like in another turn we might go crashing down a mountain. Then I remind myself. We're in the desert. The flat, ugly desert." I recently received an ARC for Wild Bird, and I spent three hours crying, laughing, cheering, tensing up, shouting, and saying "WOW" over and over again as I read this incredibly honest, powerful, and compelling story of one teenager's journey from destruction, loneliness, and bitterness to acceptance, strength, and courage. Wendelin Van Draanen takes her readers on an unforgettable ride through the Utah desert as Wren experiences eight weeks of survival camping in a "Desert Prison" and learns to start a fire in the wilderness and inside herself. As the story unfolds, Wren's anger, destructie behavior, and desperate cry for friendship, love, and understanding are revealed with poignant, insightful storytelling and masterful word imagery. The path to redemption for Wren is a long and arduous adventure that every teenager and adult should experience with her as she leaves the comforts and turmoil of home behind...to venture into the unknown and come face-to-face with physical challenges and with the reality of the person she has become. The research and attention to detail that went into describing Wren's downward spiral and her trek into the expansive Utah terrain make this an exceptional read and destined to be an award winner. Van Draanen creates an intense, gritty, thought-provoking story that lends itself to in-depth discussion. It does not cross the line with inappropriate language, violence, or gratuitous scenes. It is a novel that will leave you breathless and satisfied atthe same time. I found myself underlining passages and re-reading paragraphs to get the full impact of the messages in them. Wild Bird is a YA contemporary fiction masterpiece and a must read that will appeal to both teen and adult audiences. There is no doubt that it is destined to be a "Best Fiction for Young Adults" selection for 2018.

Awesome read. Very heart to heart and brings it all together in the end. Definitely recommend this. Liked The Running Dream also.

This is the second book I read by this author and it was really good. Very interesting and original premise, at least for me. I really loved the main's character growth throughout the book. What really buged me was how oblivious the parents were and I didn't appreciate how quickly they forgave each other.

Great read for my daughter!