Module 5: Kit's Wilderness

Bibliography
Almond, D. (2000).
 Kit's Wilderness

New York, NY: Delacorte.

Summary
Kit Watson is a thirteen-year-old boy whose family moves in with his aging grandfather.  Kit has the typical insecurities that come with this age, but to compound this, his grandfather who he loves dearly, is dying.  Just as Kit's grandfather tells him of his life of working in the nearly mines, he meets John Askew, who ironically plays a game called Death in the mines.  John is a misfit at school, but is very artistic.  Kit is both scared of him and drawn to him.  As Kit becomes more and more involved in the game called Death, he feels the children that have died in the mines are speaking to him.  Kit's best friend is Allie Keenan, who is a true friend and tries to talk him out of getting involved with John.  John has an unhappy life with his father who drinks too much.  After their teacher finds out about the Death game John is expelled from school.  John runs away from home and Kit's grandfather dies.  Eventually John comes back and his father stops drinking, as Kit deals with the loss of his grandfather.
My Impression
Kit's Wilderness was a sober look at sickness, death, and the love a young boy has for his grandfather.  The setting is during the winter and Almond does a suburb job of making the reader feel the starkness and chill of the season.  Almond uses the young characters as instruments of information as to how young people really feel when confronted with loneliness and the impending death of a love one.  I listened, rather than read, this book on CD's.  This probably helped me visualize the feelings Kit, John, Allie, Kit's grandfather, and even, John's father might be feeling.
Review
Horn Book Magazine

"A master imagist, David Almond (Skellig, rev. 5/99) returns to the ambiguous terrain of unresolved opposites: of healing and sickness, of light and dark, of life and death, of remembering and forgetting. In autumn, when the clocks turn back, thirteen-year-old Kit Watson and his parents return to the coal mining town of Stoneygate to attend to Kit's recently widowed grandfather. There Kit meets the alluring and dangerous John Askew, who seduces him into playing the game of Death: Kit joins John and other schoolmates in a haunting reenactment of death that connects them with their ghostly counterparts--ancestors who died years earlier in the mines but were not properly buried. In this rich if convoluted novel, nothing and no one is without complication, without layers. John, the school bully, is also its finest artist; he's also baby John in need of reliving a childhood he never had. Allie Keenan, their compatriot in the death games, is temptress and protector, she who Grandpa calls "the good bad lovely lass." Grandpa, who is losing his faculties, is still the novel's wise one; Kit, his loving grandson, can barely conceive of a world without him. Almond's portrait of Grandpa's attempt to understand his own forgetting, a poignant analogy to the darkness of the mines with its labyrinth-like tunnels, is a marvel of lyric writing and psychological truth. Everything shifts and slips, slithers and slides (words that Almond employs literally and metaphorically) in this novel with its winter middle of snow and frost and ice: in Kit's classroom the students explore the movements of the continents and discover the Ice Age; Allie plays the role of the evil ice girl in a school production of The Snow Queen and undergoes a miraculous thawing. Like the contradictions on which Almond's story hangs, the novel's ambitiousness is both commendable and problematic. It's not for the timid: a reader may easily lose the way. One must courageously enter unknown territory, suspend disbelief, and hold reality and magic together."
Use in Library
Kit's Wilderness would be a good group class read, especially for junior high and even high school classes. A discussion of acceptance and reactions of those being rejected would be one of the many topics groups could use in class for preteens and teens. Also, Almond use of figurative language would make this a good book to site and teach similes, metaphors, personification and imagery.

Review. (2000, March 1). [Review of the book Kit's Wilderness by David Almond]. Available from: http://libproxy.library.unt.edu:2104/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&hid=14&sid=13b5a00c-a88d-4258-8f32-7cb3017c59bd%40sessionmgr12
Image from: http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&sa=X&biw=1366&bih=643&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=aLMHdVNMStZ3XM:&imgrefurl=http://www.emusic.com/book/david-almond/kits-wilderness/10002160/&docid=7pImS-BnKtMDbM&imgurl=http://images.emusic.com/books/image