Wild Things

ALA Notable Children’s Book
Kirkus Reviews “Best Children’s Book of the Year”
Winner of the North Carolina Juvenile Literature Award
Winner of the NAPPA Gold Award

A feisty tweenage orphan discovers what it means to love and be loved in this powerful coming-of-age novel about hope, redemption, and found family
 
A headstrong girl. A stray cat. A wild boy. A man who plays with fire. Eleven-year-old Zoë trusts no one. Her father left before she was born. At the death of her irresponsible mother, Zoë goes to live with her uncle, former surgeon and famed metal sculptor, Dr. Henry Royster. She's sure Henry will fail her as everyone else has. Reclusive since his wife’s death, Henry takes Zoë to Sugar Hill, North Carolina, where he welds sculptures as stormy as his moods.
 
Zoë and Henry have much in common: brains, fiery and creative natures, and badly broken hearts. Zoë confronts small-town prejudice with a quick temper. She warms to Henry’s odd but devoted friends, meets a mysterious teenage boy living wild in the neighboring woods, and works to win the trust of a feral cat while struggling to trust in anyone herself.

In this award-winning coming-of-age tale for young readers, Zoë’s questing spirit leads her to uncover the wild boy’s identity, lay bare a local lie, and begin to understand the true power of Henry’s art. Then one decisive night she and the boy risk everything in a reckless act of heroism . . .“Carmichael gives a familiar plot fresh new life in this touching story with a finely crafted sense of place . . . Zoë’s fierce, funny voice is compelling.”
—Booklist

“A tribute to the power of story, this is ultimately a tale of hope and redemption. Zoe Royster, peer to the literary heroines she so loves, is as memorable in her own way as the Great Gilly Hopkins, Opal Buloni and Anne Shirley.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Carmichael’s a smooth and evocative stylist . . . [Zoe] is at times a new-millennium Shirley Temple in her relentlessly adorable moppetry.”
—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s BooksClay Carmichael has written award-winning children's books that have been translated into many languages. She teaches writing and illustrating and lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.I'd hoped for better, Henry's being a heart doctor. A job like that, you'd think he might actually have a heart.
As usual, I pushed the cart down the aisle myself, taking what I needed off the shelves, the new grown-up as useless as those before him. Negative help, as Mama's friend Manny used to say, negative being less than none. No big deal. Grocery shopping and I were old friends, along with toilet scrubbing, vacuuming, and wash.
Said grown-up—my before-last-Monday-never-heard-of Uncle Henry—trailed behind, … alternating between keeping five or six paces back like I was contagious and breathing down my neck in the unlikely event I needed him for something. I wondered why he'd claimed me at all. —FROM THE BOOK