Wolf Hollow

Lauren Wolk's Wolf Hollow is a quiet, gripping story for 11 year olds about the autumn a girl learns how much her words can matter.

What happens

Annabelle is eleven and lives on a farm in the hills with three generations of her family. It's 1943. The war is on the radio every evening, and her biggest worry used to be her gran's poorly heart.

Then Betty arrives. She's been sent from the city to stay with her grandparents, and the whisper at school is that she's "incorrigible" (Annabelle has to look it up in the big dictionary).

Betty waits for her on the path through Wolf Hollow with a stick. She wants something every day. And if Annabelle tells anyone, she says she'll go after James, Annabelle's little brother.

The other person on the hillside is Toby. He's a silent man who fought in the first war, lives in an old smokehouse and walks the hills from morning to night with three guns on his back. Plenty of people are wary of him. Annabelle isn't, and their odd friendship (a borrowed camera, a posy of wildflowers, a lost penny handed back) is one of the loveliest things in the book.

Later Betty goes missing, and people are quick to point at Toby.

It's Annabelle telling it, looking back, and her voice is calm and careful and very beautiful. You really feel the farm in autumn, with the last apples and potatoes to bring in and supper parcels left in a crate for Toby. The tension creeps up on you, because you know from the very first page that something is going to go badly wrong. How do you do the right thing when the truth might make everything worse?

Be ready for how heavy it gets. Betty hits Annabelle with a stick hard enough to leave a big bruise, and her threats to hurt the younger children are frightening. There's talk of wolves being shot, and the camps come up on the wartime news. Nothing is gory, but it's serious, and it sits right at the top of this shelf.

A thoughtful older reader who cares a lot about fairness will find it very hard to put down.

What to read next

There's more Lauren Wolk to discover, too. Beyond the Bright Sea is told by Crow, a twelve-year-old who washed up on a tiny island as a baby and decides it's time to find out where she came from.