Tell the Wolves I'm Home (2012) Carol Rifka Brunt

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Tell the Wolves I'm Home (2012)

by Carol Rifka Brunt

Westchester, New York

New York: 10/105

Upstate New York: 9/23

   Carol Rifka Brunt is a huge one hit wonder- Tell the Wolves I'm Home was a YA smash back in 2012 and then that was it- she hasn't published a thing since.  No short story collection, no memoir,  no second book, period. I read on her Wikipedia that she is married to an astronomer and has three kids- that would be enough to keep anyone busy. 

     Tell the Wolves I'm Home is about a precocious (is there any other kind?) 14 year old girl living in Westchester county with her slightly older sister and her Mom and Dad, both accountants- though their careers are as depicted through the understanding of a fairly unworldly 14 year old.  Specifically, that they are very busy around "tax time" and don't have much time for their kids. 

   The plot, essentially, is that precocious June Elbus has a beloved uncle Finn, her Mom's brother, who is a famous artist (painter, in typically YA fashion- hard to imagine he would be a performance artist!) and who, in the opening pages of the book, dies of AIDS.  In as much as this book is about anything besides the thoughts and experiences of a fourteen year old girl, it's about AIDS and the early days of AIDS, when people with AIDS were hated and feared- before the United States Government officially acknowledged it's existence.  

    Finn has left behind Toby, his bad-boy ex-con, illegal English immigrant boyfriend, and if you have the kind of specific knowledge about how the criminal justice system and immigration interact, you will have to leave aside that information and just go with the flow of the book.   June travels back and forth to Manhattan and forms a friendship with Toby while seeking a better understanding of her feelings about her dead uncle and AIDS, generally speaking.  Meanwhile, her slightly older sister Greta is having her own issues and that relationship functions as a subplot. 

   There's no denying the power of this book, specifically as it relates to the early days of AIDS.  It's clear that June and her family live in the New York suburbs, but you could have just as easily assigned this book to Manhattan, where Toby/Finn live/lived in an apartment owned by Finn.