Wildwood review
A good story with bold ambition that would be twice as good if it was half as long.
Wildwood is an ambitious children’s fantasy novel that’s around 540 pages.
I picked it up for £1.99 and, while it’s imaginative and richly drawn, my biggest takeaway is that it’s too long.
The world
Meloy builds a vivid, layered setting. Northwood is free-spirited and open, Southwood is pompous and tangled in politics and the middle ground is lawless territory ruled by bandits and coyotes. The author does a good job building a world you would want to visit yourself.
This regional contrast gives the book depth. Southwood’s early political struggles with the birds were engaging. Unfortunately, this thread is dropped too quickly once Prue leaves to start her quest, wasting the potential. It’s never picked up again, either, so you’re left wondering what the point of it all was.
The characters
Prue is a strong protagonist.
Her motivation, rescuing her baby brother, grounds the story, though she feels overly protected by plot armour and never makes any real sacrifices or gets hurt. The coincidental nature of her parent’s involvement seems more as a way to justify her time away from the real world more than a legitimate story beat.
Curtis, by contrast, is by far the weakest element and most annoying. His cowardice doesn’t develop into anything meaningful. Whenever he’s in danger, it’s always other people who save him. His decision to remain in the Wood and abandon his family back home was ridiculous.
I’d argue that, even without Curtis, the story of Wildwood would have unfolded in the exact same way.
The Dowager Governess, Alexandra, is a strong antagonist at first. Her motivations are clear and sympathetic, rooted in revenge for past wrongs. But even she is underused.
Her reason for vengeance stems from how South Wood treated her, which makes her decision to destroy the entire forest baffling. It seems it's there to artificially raise the stakes and get every tribe and town involved. Otherwise, North Wood wouldn’t care (as they had no part in her banishment) and she'd probably win.
She loses her initial punch and focus, with an anticlimactic “death” that transparently sets her up for a sequel.
We find out at the end of the book that South Wood doesn’t have a way to stop the coup from happening. It’s stated multiple times how Alexandra spent years building a vast army well into the thousands.
Why didn't she start her conquest by taking South Wood first? She has guns and they don't. Am I missing something?
Style and pacing
Meloy’s prose is over descriptive.
Long passages of forest description add little and slow the pace. Advanced vocabulary slips in that feels ill-suited for younger readers.
What nine-year-old knows what a basilica is without having to look it up?
Structurally, the constant flip-flopping between Prue and Curtis’s perspectives kills momentum. Why did we spend so long reading about Curtis trapped in the warren when the talking rat had the keys all along?
The plot
The novel begins strongly with South Wood’s politics and tensions, then loses focus.
By part three, the story drags under endless battle preparations and an anticlimactic conflict in which no main characters are harmed.
The overthrow of South Wood’s corrupt government is rushed, with little exploration of the aftermath or justice for its leaders who were front and centre of Part One.
Verdict
Wildwood shines in its imaginative world and occasional bursts of political intrigue, but suffers from poor pacing, needless description and underdeveloped character arcs.
It’s a good story with bold ambition that would be twice as good if it was half as long.
But for a children’s fantasy story, it’s fine.
7/10
