Kit's Wilderness

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Kit has just moved to Stoneygate with his family, to live with his ageing grandfather who is gradually succumbing to Alzheimer's Disease. Stoneygate is an insular place, scarred by its mining history - by the danger and death it has brought them. Where the coal mine used to be there is now a wilderness.
Here Kit meets Askew, a surly and threatening figure who masterminds the game called Death, a frightening ritual of hypnotism; and Kit makes friends with Allie, the clever school troublemaker. As Kit struggles to adjust to his new life and the gradual failing of his beloved grandfather, these two friendships pull him towards a terrifying resolution. Haunted by ghosts of the past, Kit must confront death and - ultimately - life.

A stunning novel from the author of the modern children's classic Skellig - winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's Book Award. David Almond is also winner of the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen award.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

1 In Stoneygate there was a wilderness. It was an empty space between the houses and the river, where the ancient pit, the mine, had been. That's where we played Askew's game, the game called Death. We used to gather at the school's gates after the bell had rung. We stood there whispering and giggling. After five minutes, Bobby Carr told us it was time and he led us through the wilderness to Askew's den, a deep hole dug into the earth with old doors slung across it as an entrance and a roof. The place was hidden from the school and from the houses of Stoneygate by the slope and by the tall grasses growing around it. The wild dog Jax waited for us there. When Jax began to growl, Askew drew one of the doors aside. He looked out at us, checked the faces, called us down. We stumbled one by one down the crumbling steps. We crouched against the walls. The floor was hard-packed clay. Candles burned in niches in the walls. There was a heap of bones in a corner. Askew told us they were human bones, discovered when he'd dug this place. There was a blackened ditch where a fire burned in winter. The den was lined with dried mud. Askew had carved pictures of us all, of animals, of the dogs and cats we owned, of the wild dog Jax, of imagined monsters and demons, of the gates of Heaven and the snapping jaws of Hell. He wrote into the walls the names of all of us who'd died in there. My friend Allie Keenan sat across the den from me. The blankness in her eyes said: You're on your own down here. Askew wore black jeans, black sneakers, a black T-shirt with "Megadeth" in white across it. He lit a cigarette and passed it round the ring. He passed around a jug of water that he said was special water, collected from a spring that had its source in the blocked-up tunnels of the ancient coal mine far below. He crouched at the center, sharpening his sheath knife on a stone. His dark hair tumbled across his eyes, his pale face flickered in the candlelight. "You have come into this ancient place to play the game called Death," he whispered. He laid the knife at the center on a square of glass. He eyed us all. We chewed our lips, held our breath, our hearts thudded. Sometimes a squeak of fear from someone, sometimes a stifled snigger. "Whose turn is it to die?" he whispered. He spun the knife. We chanted, "Death Death Death Death . . ." And then the knife stopped, pointing at the player. The player had to reach out, to take Askew's hand. Askew drew him from the fringes to the center. "There will be a death this day," said Askew. The player had to kneel before Askew, then crouch on all fours. He had to breathe deeply and slowly, then quickly and more quickly still. He had to lift his head and stare into Askew's eyes. Askew held the knife before his face. "Do you abandon life?" said Askew. "I abandon life." "Do you truly wish to die?" "I truly wish to die." Askew held his shoulder. He whispered gently into his ear, then with his thumb and index finger he closed the player's eyes and said, "This is Death." And the player fell to the floor, dead still, while the rest of us gathered in a ring around him. "Rest in peace," said Askew. "Rest in peace," said all of us. Then Askew slid the door aside and we climbed out into the light. Askew came out last. He slid the door back into place, leaving the dead one in the dark. We lay together in the long grass, in the sunlight, by the shining river. Askew crouched apart from us, smoking a cigarette, hunched over, sunk in his gloom. We waited for the dead one to come back. Sometimes the dead came quickly back to us. Sometimes it took an age, and on those days our whispering and sniggering came to an end. We glanced nervously at each other, chewed our nails. As time went on, the more nervous ones lifted their schoolbags, glanced fearfully at Askew, set off singly or in pairs toward home. Sometimes we whispered of sliding the door back in order to check on our friend down there, but Askew, without turning to us, would snap, "No. Death has its own time. Wake him now and all he'll know forever after is a waking death." So we waited, in silence and dread. In the end, everyone came back. We saw at last the white fingers gripping the door from below. The door slid back. The player scrambled out. He blinked in the light, stared at us. He grinned sheepishly, or stared in amazement, as if emerged from an astounding dream. Askew didn't move. "Resurrection, eh?" he murmured. He laughed dryly to himself. We gathered around the dead one. "What was it like?" we whispered. "What was it like?" We left Askew hunched there by the river, strolled back together through the wilderness with the dead one in our midst. From the Paperback edition. Excerpted from Kit's Wilderness by David Almond All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Revisiting many of the themes from Skellig, Almond offers another tantalizing blend of human drama, surrealism and allegory. He opens the novel with a triumphant scene, in which Kit Watson, the 13-year-old narrator, and his classmates, John Askew and Allie Keenan reemerge from "ancient darkness into a shining valley," as if to reassure readers throughout the course of the cryptic tale that the game of "Death," so central to the book, is indeed just a game. Nevertheless, he takes readers on a thrilling and spine-tingling ride. When Kit moves with his mother and father to the mining town of Stoneygate to keep company with his newly widowed grandfather, he feels drawn to John Askew who, like Kit, comes from a long line of coal miners. Askew presses Kit to take part in a game of "Death," for which the participants spin a knife to determine whose turn it is to "die." The chosen one then remains alone in the darkness of Askew's den, to join spirits with boys killed in a coal mine accident in 1821. Some regular players consider the game to be make-believe, but Kit senses something far more profound and dangerous, and the connection he forges with the ancient past also circuitously seals a deeper bond with Askew. Allie acts as a bridge between the two worlds, much as Mina was for Michael in Skellig. The ability that Askew, Kit and his grandpa possess to pass between two seductive worlds, here and beyond, in many ways expands on the landscape Almond created in Skellig. The intricacy and complexity of the book's darker themes make it a more challenging read than his previous novel for children, but the structure is as awe-inspiring as the ancient mining tunnels that run beneath Stoneygate. Ages 12-up. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 5-9-This haunting, lyrical novel by David Almond (Delacorte, 2000) will appeal to teachers because of the beauty of its language and its manipulation of themes. The supernatural elements and gripping story will engage students. Shakespearean actor Charles Keating's narration is especially welcome because his good oral interpretation helps clarify Almond's Briticisms. The story deals with the eerie influence of the past, from the recently defunct mining industry in Kit's ancestral hometown, to the beginning of humankind. It also focuses on the necessity of the arts, particularly the art of storytelling, to the emotional well-being and even survival of those sensitive to the rhythms of the world and the ripples of time. The hook, both for Kit and for the readers, is the game called Death played in an abandoned mine shaft by a group of misfits at Kit's new school. He is invited to join in by John Askew, a brooding social outcast and talented artist. John, who represents the dark side, is also just a boy from a dysfunctional family who desperately needs Kit's help. This audiobook is a must have, even for those libraries where recordings are not usually a priority.-Diana Dickerson, White Pigeon Community Schools, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Gr. 6^-9. Almond, whose Skellig is the Booklist 1999 Top of the List winner for youth fiction, creates a heartbreakingly real world fused with magic realism in this story, set in an English coal-mining town. Thirteen-year-old Kit Watson and his family have returned to Stonygate to care for Kit's recently widowed grandfather. Almost immediately, Kit is enticed by John Askew, also of an old mining family, into a game called Death. Like the other members of Askew's gang, Kit is left alone in an abandoned mine until he sees ghosts of ancestors who died there as boys. Kit's friend Allie tells him that the other kids pretend to see these apparitions, but Kit really does see--and Askew knows it. The boys share a bond. Both are artistic: Kit is a writer; Askew is an artist. And both are sensitive enough to perceive what may not be there. But Kit comes from a strong, loving family, and Askew is the child of an ineffectual mother and a father who's a vicious drunk. Slowly, as Kit hears stories from his grandfather and writes his own, he realizes he has a mission--to save John Askew, body and soul. Almond has set an enormous task for himself. He juggles several plot elements--grandfather's fading mental capacities, Allie's acting aspirations, one of Kit's stories--along with the boys' struggle for redemption. But he succeeds beautifully, knitting dark and light together and suffusing the multilayered plot with an otherworldly glow. This is a long book, and a complex one, but Almond's language is a pleasure to read; and, as with Skellig, the story's ruminations about death and the healing power of love will strike children in unsuspected ways. --Ilene Cooper

Horn Book Review

(Young Adult) 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. s.p.b. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

Almond (Skellig, 1999) spins teenagers of very different backgrounds and experience into a whirl of ghosts and dreams, stories-within-stories, joy, heartache, and redemption. In order to be able to care for his newly widowed grandfather, Kit has moved with his parents to the town of Stoneygate, perched in desolate decline on top of a maze of abandoned coal mines. He is soon drawn to follow wild, unstable, aptly named John Askew into a game called ``Death'' that leaves him sealed up in a tunnel; Kit emerges from the darkness with images of children and others killed in the mines flickering at the edge of his sight, and a strange, deep affinity for Askew. Inspired by Askew's brutal family life, and gifted with a restless, brilliant imagination, Kit begins a prehistoric quest tale involving two lost children'a story that takes on a life of its own. Setting his tale in a town where the same family names appear on both mailboxes and tombstones, and where dark places are as common as sad memories, Almond creates a physical landscape that embodies the emotional one through which his characters also move, adding an enriching symbolic layer by giving acts and utterances the flavor of ritual. Askew is a compelling, almost shamanistic figure (not another Skellig, but close), and both in tone and locale this powerful story is reminiscent of Alan Garner's Stone Book quartet. (Fiction. 12-14)