Book #91: Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk

I listened to this book, and I think that tainted my enjoyment of it. This story felt very suspenseful and ominous, and I think I would have liked it better if I could have sped through it in two hours like it would have taken me to read it. As it was, I kind of dreaded coming back to it every time I was due to listen, and I'm pretty sure the only reason I actually finished this one was because it was only about 7 hours long, which felt very manageable.

This book is about Annabelle McBride, an eleven-year-old girl in 1943, who gets caught up with a bully at her rural school in--Pennsylvania? I guess I never paid attention to which state exactly it was. This bully, Betty, started demanding money from her and causing problems--but then the problems start getting bigger and bigger and involving more and more people, including Toby, the WWI vet suffering major PTSD who lives nearby, who many people think is strange but whom Annabelle and her family know is a good man. Annabelle learns the importance of her own choices and how to lie or tell the truth as the situation demands it, and she does all these things to try to protect Toby as Betty begins to try and drive him away.

It was a very non-dramatic story, in some ways--nothing totally traumatic happens to Annabelle--but things always felt as though something terrible was about to happen. She makes some choices that I was a little annoyed with, but I guess as an eleven-year-old you can't argue too much with their judgment sometimes. I was somewhat surprised by the ending--I expected things to be wrapped up nicely in their neat little bow and for the bully to learn her lesson and everything to return back to normal, but that's not how things ended, and I liked that it was a little different than I expected. Definitely a well-written book, but not quite my favorite in the world. I was also surprised that this was a middle-grade book, because nothing about it felt middle grade except for maybe the fact that the narrator/main character is eleven. It felt very serious and grown-up in the rest of it.