“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond
Delacorte Books (2000)
240 pages

I picked up this book mostly because I recognised the title as one of the Printz winners. The Printz winners and honour books have never disappointed me yet — it’s one of the awards where I’ve consistently liked the books, compared to, say, the Carnegie medal winners, for instance. So this ended up as one of the first books I checked out from the community library. My first thought, barely a few short chapters in, was “my sister would love this book”. I have a bad habit of thinking my sister being younger than she is. She’s already almost twenty, but I still think she’s twelve or so. She loves John Green’s books, though I’ve never asked her if she preferred An Abundance of Katherines (which I still haven’t read, woe, shame, etc) or Looking for Alaska, or she loved them equally. If nothing else, the way Kit’s Wilderness lingers with you even when you put it down made me think of Looking for Alaska, especially the second half of that book.

Kit is thirteen, returning with his parents to live with his grandfather in a small coal-mining town in England after his grandmother’s death. Kit’s ancestors had lived and died in the mines, and there’s a lot of history he’s coming home to. He’s sensitive, quiet, perhaps a little too naive, and he befriends the bright, cheerful Allie and the dark and brooding John Askew. Askew gets Kit into trouble with the game of Death they play, which to many of their friends is just make believe, but Kit begins to realise that there’s something more.

The prose is haunting and careful and delicate, the imagery beautiful. The skinny ghost children Kit sees still give me a shudder when I think of them. What’s real and what’s not gets blurred steadily as the narrative moves along, and I simply stopped questioning it and just believed. The first person narrative actually works for me this time. The dialogue trips me sometimes, but often it works well enough to make me smile. (Poor Kit gets flustered so often, going “Eh? Eh?”, causing Allie to mock him, though never with real malice. Oh, Kit.) There are many threads to the story — the story of Silky, told by Kit’s grandfather whose health is slowly failing, the stories Kit writes, John Askew’s drawings and his troubled family, Allie’s love for acting — and all of them are woven together slowly and deliberately, holding everything together.

The character relationships made this work. Kit and Allie, helping each other, even when they are at odds; Kit and Askew as Kit struggles to understand him and bring him back. And then there’s the wonderful parts with Kit and his grandfather, and the stories and memories he shares with his grandson.

The pace is a bit slow, yes, but I think it suits the book’s careful dealing of darker themes.