Module 5: Other Award Winners- Michael Prints Award

Module 5: Other Award Winners- Michael Prints Award

Book: Kit’s Wilderness

Author: David Almond

Plot

            Kit Watson is one of the children from the old families of Stoneygate who left the town and moves back with his family to take care of his ailing grandfather whose health deteriorates even faster after his wife, Kit’s grandmother, dies. As Kit tries to settle in and get used to his ancestral town, a boy name John Askew-resident bad news bear- approaches him and claims him to be ‘just like him’. As days pass, John Askew continues to approach Kit and eventually befriends him and invites him to play the game of death. The town of Stoneygate is a mining town and children used to mine in the underground pits, many of whom died. In the game of Death, the kids who play spin a bottle and wherever it lands on is the dead one. The dead one stays in the cave while the rest leave the dead and wait until he or she is resurrected. The novel blends fantasy and real life in an ambiguous fashion and the reader must suspend all belief and read the novel for what it is in order to fully enjoy it. The game of death brings forth ghosts of the past and of the gamers past and meshes the living with the dead. When Kit becomes the dead one and is resurrected, his behavior changes and his teacher becomes worried about him which leads her to the cave where they play Death. At this point, she realizes that John Askew is the ring leader and gets him expelled which lead him to run away. John is angry at Kit and summons him to the cave where he runs away to and confronts Kit. But, John’s anger diminishes as Kit tells him that he wrote a story about him and his ghosts. The end of the novel has John being accepted back into art school and back to his home, he and Kit are ok, and Kit’s grandfather finally succumbs to death. A very heavy novel, this book excellent on a literary level and dark in imagery.

 

Impression of Novel

            I loved this book. As soon as I opened it and read it, I was pulled into the darkness and all that lighted my way were the characters. I have a thing for darker books…I remember being eleven and The Boggart and loving it and then The Dark is Rising and loving that too. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book like this book and I’m very glad I did. Kit’s Wilderness is very deserving of the Michael Printz Award.

Usage in a Library Setting

            After reading the novel, I would begin a discussion on mining and what countries and cities had mining as their main form of work. Then continue the discussion with a little bit of research on such towns and see what the benefits and drawbacks are of mining and compare and contrast that of the novels themes with the town’s issues. I would also include a ghost story aspect to it where we research whether a certain town is known to have ghosts or ghost stories.

Review

            “A master imagist, David Almond (Skellig, rev. 5/99) returns to the ambiguous terrain of unresolved opposites: of healing and sickness, of light and dark, of life and death, of remembering and forgetting. In autumn, when the clocks turn back, thirteen-year-old Kit Watson and his parents return to the coal mining town of Stoneygate to attend to Kit's recently widowed grandfather. There Kit meets the alluring and dangerous John Askew, who seduces him into playing the game of Death: Kit joins John and other schoolmates in a haunting reenactment of death that connects them with their ghostly counterparts--ancestors who died years earlier in the mines but were not properly buried. In this rich if convoluted novel, nothing and no one is without complication, without layers. John, the school bully, is also its finest artist; he's also baby John in need of reliving a childhood he never had. Allie Keenan, their compatriot in the death games, is temptress and protector, she who Grandpa calls "the good bad lovely lass." Grandpa, who is losing his faculties, is still the novel's wise one; Kit, his loving grandson, can barely conceive of a world without him. Almond's portrait of Grandpa's attempt to understand his own forgetting, a poignant analogy to the darkness of the mines with its labyrinth-like tunnels, is a marvel of lyric writing and psychological truth. Everything shifts and slips, slithers and slides (words that Almond employs literally and metaphorically) in this novel with its winter middle of snow and frost and ice: in Kit's classroom the students explore the movements of the continents and discover the Ice Age; Allie plays the role of the evil ice girl in a school production of The Snow Queen and undergoes a miraculous thawing. Like the contradictions on which Almond's story hangs, the novel's ambitiousness is both commendable and problematic. It's not for the timid: a reader may easily lose the way. One must courageously enter unknown territory, suspend disbelief, and hold reality and magic together.”- Susan P. Bloom

APA Citation

Almond, D. (2000). Kit's wilderness. New York: Delacorte Press.

Bloom, S. P. (2000). Kit's Wilderness. Horn Book Magazine, 76(2), 192.