Wildwood is a 2011 fantasy novel by Colin Meloy, illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis. The 541-page novel, inspired by classic fantasy novels and folk tales, is the story of two seventh-graders who are drawn into a hidden, magical forest, while trying to rescue a baby kidnapped by crows. They get caught up in an epic struggle, and learn of their connection to a magical parallel world while confronting adult authorities who are often cowardly or dishonest. The natural beauty and local color of Portland, Oregon, feature prominently in the book.
Ellis collaborated closely with Meloy throughout the writing phase to produce 85 illustrations, which, along with the old-fashioned book design, were particularly praised by reviewers. The majority of reviews were positive, on balance, saying the book was an engrossing story appropriate for its target age, but they also noted that the plot sometimes dragged, that familiar fantasy motifs were sometimes overused, and that stereotypical Portland culture was a little overplayed. Wildwood was on the New York Times Best Seller list of Children's Chapter Books for two weeks and tied for the 2012 E. B. White Read Aloud Award.
Plot
Part One Prue is in a park with her baby brother Mac when a murder of crows swoops down and carries him away. Prue runs after him (followed by her classmate Curtis, unbeknownst to her), and sees the crows carry Mac into the mysterious Impassable Wilderness. Prue goes home to her parents and manages to make it look like she still has Mac by bundling up a blanket. The next morning, she heads for the Wilderness but discovers Curtis has once more followed her. Prue does not want Curtis along, but before she can send him back, they are separated while fleeing from coyote soldiers. Curtis is captured and taken to Alexandra, the Dowager Governess (the leader of the coyotes), while Prue rides a mail truck to South Wood. There, Prue finds a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and dysfunctional government. Police state tactics and paranoia over foreign threats are used to keep the regime in power. Prue eventually meets the Crown Prince Owl Rex of the Avian Principality, who tells her how Alexandra came to be exiled shortly before he himself is arrested.
Alexandra's son Alexei died in a horse-riding accident, and her husband Grigor died of heartbreak; to remedy his death, Alexandra hired the two greatest toymakers in all of Wildwood to fashion her son a new body that was later brought to life by recalling his soul via black magic. Later Alexei learned the truth of his death and rebirth and purposefully destroyed a crucial part of his inner workings, resulting in his second death. Alexandra was exiled for the use of black magic and plotted her revenge. Owl Rex proposes that Prue cross Wildwood and find help from the mystics of North Wood. Meanwhile, Alexandra is flattering Curtis with a fancy uniform and commissions him into the coyote army as an officer. In a battle against bandits, Curtis breaks a howitzer by dumb luck, becoming a coyote war hero in the operation. He then finds Mac in Alexandra's headquarters. Alexandra divulges her plan to sacrifice the baby to the magical ivy of the Wood, which will allow the ivy to rapidly consume the Wood and its inhabitants. Alexandra offers to share the power with Curtis, but he refuses and is locked away in a cage with some other captured bandits and unfaithful coyotes.
Part Two Prue flies to North Wood on the back of an eagle sent by Owl Rex but is shot down by a coyote archer. She is found by Brendan, the King of the Bandits, who offers to help. However, they are captured in a coyote attack and Brendan is imprisoned with Curtis while Prue is taken to Alexandra. Alexandra promises her that she will find Mac, convincing Prue to leave the Woods. In prison, Curtis reveals Alexandra's plan and then leads an escape, earning the trust of the coyote and bandit prisoners. Prue returns home, where she learns from her parents that they were only able to conceive Prue and Mac because they had made a deal with Alexandra to use her magic, but that Alexandra's price was the second child that Prue's mother bore. Realizing that she has been tricked, Prue returns to Wildwood to rescue Mac.
Part Three Back in the Impassable Wilderness, Prue travels to see the mystics in charge of North Wood. Meanwhile, Curtis and the other escapees rejoin the bandits and set out to stop Alexandra. Prue alerts the elder mystic, Iphigenia, and the citizen militia gather weapons and march south. Prue rides her bicycle ahead and convinces the bandits to join forces. Just as the sacrifice is about to occur, the armies meet in an ivy-filled ruin. Brendan gives a speech to inspire his forces, christening the combined army the Wildwood Irregulars.
The Battle for the Plinth ensues, and the Wildwood Irregulars are near defeat. As Alexandra prepares to carry out the sacrifice, Iphigenia confronts her. Curtis and the remnants of the army make a final push, expecting to be cut down when above them the sky is filled with an army of eagles and other birds from the Avians. The battle turns against the coyote army, but Prue discovers that she can control plants the way the mystics can and uses her new skill to make the tree boughs snatch Mac from Alexandra. Brendan shoots Alexandra with an arrow and the ivy consumes her. Brendan is now in command of the ivy and is told by Iphigenia to make it sleep, and he does so. The victorious Wildwood Irregulars regroup and press on to the gates of South Wood and demand that the corrupt government resign. As a new, peaceful order begins among the factions of The Wood, Prue and Curtis part ways as new friends: she goes home with Mac while Curtis remains behind to start a new life as a bandit.
Characters In Wildwood, everyone is either of The Wood, or is an Outsider, or, in the special case of the protagonists, a "half breed", that is, an Outsider who is able to enter The Wood. A sort of "aura or shine" makes it possible to visually identify which of these things a person is. The first human Prue meets in The Wood is an old man driving a mail truck, Richard, the South Wood Postmaster General. She sees in him something she "couldn't put her finger on that seemed to exude from him, something that made him seem like no one she'd ever met before. It was a kind of aura or shine, like the way a familiar landscape is transformed in the light of a full moon." The natives of The Wood are consistently able to recognize Prue and Curtis as Outsiders, who ought not to be able to enter through the Periphery Bind surrounding The Wood, while only the people of the pastoral and meditative North Wood can see with an unexplained sense that Prue and Curtis have a dual nature, born outside The Wood yet unhindered by the magical barrier that keeps the Outsiders out.
Prue
Prue McKeel, age 12, is a precocious seventh grader with a talent for nature drawing, an encyclopedic knowledge of birds from a book, and takes Honors English with her classmate Curtis. Like her parents, and Curtis, Prue is "very-Portland", with stereotypical interests like yoga, vegetarianism, and single-speed bicycles, which she repairs and tunes herself. Prue is decisive, determined, and courageous, finding inspiration in Nancy Drew in her effort to rescue her brother, and along the way, save Curtis and The Wood itself. Unlike Curtis, she is not cowed by anyone, standing up to Lars Svik the Governor-Regent of South Wood, Crown Prince Owl Rex of the Avian Principality, and even the fearsome Alexandra, the Dowager Governess, as well as her parents. Because Prue's birth came about by Alexandra using witchcraft to overcome Prue's parents' difficulty conceiving a child, she shares some essence of The Wood, along with being an Outsider, which is what made it possible for her to cross the magical barrier that protects The Wood. Meloy said that Prue is a composite character, "partly Carson as a kid," with her "inner world" coming from Ellis's childhood. She is also based on the niece of a friend, a girl with "an amazing independent streak that we've always admired."
Curtis
Curtis Mehlberg is a 12-year-old, and a seventh grade classmate of Prue's, though not her close friend at the beginning of Wildwood. In the past Prue and Curtis shared an interest in drawing superhero fan art, but Prue has moved on to botanical illustration, leaving Curtis and his love of comic books behind. He is an awkward "persecuted loner" who lacks Prue's confidence, and is, at first, easily intimidated and manipulated by Prue, Alexandra, and others. He grows in the course of the book, gaining a more definite sense of who he is after being forced to choose sides and stand up to the Dowager Governess Alexandra. His relationship with Alexandra recalls the seduction of Edmund Pevensie by the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. After being hustled into an ill-fitting role as an officer in the coyote army, he inadvertently distinguishes himself in battle. Later, by free choice, he becomes a full member of the bandits, and decides to stay behind with them in Wildwood, even as Prue returns home to St. Johns. Like Prue, Curtis is a "half-breed" who has a dual nature that allows him to enter The Wood, but the exact nature of this connection not revealed in Wildwood, other than Curtis speculating that he has a strange reclusive aunt, and a number of odd relatives.
Curtis's choice to stay in Wildwood leaves behind a grieving family in Portland. Meloy said that reading fantasy stories growing up, about "kids going to other worlds or crossing over to another place, it would invariably involve them coming back at the end," and "Whenever that character made a choice to come back, it didn't feel true to me for some reason." Meloy wanted to experiment with a character who did what Meloy wanted to do, even though he had a happy childhood and loving family. Meloy was able to connect with Curtis: "I think of Curtis as being a version of myself." As a child, Meloy "desperately longed to be taken away to another world."
Alexandra Alexandra, the exiled Dowager Governess of South Wood, is the main antagonist of Wildwood. She is charming and beautiful, and vastly more sophisticated and civilized than her anarchic coyote soldiers she only recently domesticated. In spite of her ruthlessness and murderous intentions, she is a somewhat tragic figure as a grieving mother whose madness is somewhat explained by the loss of her child. Ellis said, of the illustration of Alexandra holding a knife over Mac, "as a mom of a little kid, just drawing that made my blood run cold." The action of Wildwood is driven by her plot to take revenge on everyone and everything in The Wood, in which she intends to use Prue's brother Mac as a blood sacrifice in a spell to control The Wood's Ivy, which will then grow out of control and consume every living thing in The Wood. The invasive threat of the magical ivy apocalypse that Alexandra plotted in the book is similar to the threat of an "ivy desert" monoculture from invasive English ivy (Hedera helix) in the real Forest Park.
The Bandits The bandits are a small community of thieves led by the Bandit King, Brendan, a wild, tough man, whose curly orange hair is always tangled in leaves and twigs from the forest. Curtis helps him and a few other bandit prisoners escape from Alexandra's prison, and so he is named a bandit. Their small community isn't very thriving, especially with the economy being down. The bandits are threatened by the Dowager Governess' ivy, as well as the whole forest, and so he is cornered into having to fight along the citizens of North Wood and Prue.
Setting