#the wicker king

Books I Read in 2022

#22 – The Wicker King, by K. Ancrum

• Forgotten YA Gems BOTM
• Rating: 3/5 stars

February’s pick for one of my book clubs, and I just managed to squeeze it in. This wasn’t at all on my radar before, and I don’t know that I would have chosen to read it on my own, but I’m glad I did.

However, I got the audiobook from my library because that’s what was available to me quickly; because I didn’t know anything about the work beforehand, it’s only now that I’m engaging with other reviews that I discovered I’d missed out on the mixed-media aspect of it. Would I have liked this better if I had access to all its content, rather than just the text? I’ll never know for sure, but probably. For that reason, I don’t recommend to others to listen to the audiobook unless that’s a necessary format for them personally.

This is a book that defies the cookie-cutter “good” representation that so many of us (myself included) have been trained by recent discourse to demand from our fictional media. Jack and August are bisexual, even if it takes most of the book for August to understand that about himself. By the end of the story, they’re poly as well, which is just not something that sees the light of day very often, and I appreciate that. These relationships are core to who they are, not shallow additions to make the story edgy, or marketable to a target audience hungry to see themselves on the page.

At the same time, pretty much everyone in this story and everything about it is just fucked up. There’s so much toxicity, so many small instances of abuse, and a romanticization of co-dependency that I find disturbing, even though I see the author making it very clear that Jack and August aren’t role models for creating and maintaining healthy relationships. How do you balance “co-dependency is bad” with “but they still get together in the end” and not create some conflicting feelings in your readers? I’m a romance author and heavily a romance reader, so coming at it from that angle, this work has some serious issues–but it’s not presented as a traditional romance and I’m pleased to see that few of the total readers on Goodreads have classified it as such. Since it’s not intended to be a romance novel, I shouldn’t treat it as one–it’s primarily about mental health. The romance subplot is not incidental, but it is also just one element of a complex story.

Still, it’s hard to root for these two boys and their girl, when getting together is their happy ending after so much trauma, when they’re all carrying so much baggage. Yes, the ending is hopeful, they are maybe all moving on to better things for themselves, but it’s bittersweet at best when those relationships were so fraught to begin with. A part of me still wants to shake these three by the shoulders and tell them to run, to get out before something goes horribly wrong.

Content aside, I had some other issues. The pacing was so tight and the scenes so short that it felt scattered, though I admit this issue may have been exacerbated by the format; the bite-size scenes, each led off by a word or short phrase that I didn’t even realize at first were a sort of chapter heading, were disconcertingly abrupt when listening to them. Even if I had been reading on a page at my own pace, though, with the extra materials I missed out on, this extreme focus on small snippets of the characters’ lives came off as shallow, despite the subject matter being so dark and deep; I wanted a little more time with them, to get into their heads, or to have their behavior shown to me in patterns, to allow me to draw some conclusions for myself about how they interacted. This work relied on telling rather than showing, and I no longer feel a reactionary, blanket disapproval for that as I once did–but I still prefer being allowed to discover at least some things for myself, and there wasn’t much opportunity for that here.

Did I like it? Ultimately, yes. It’s strange and challenging and at times incredibly dark, and it’s a minefield of sensitive trigger issues that might blow up in your face at any moment, but it’s interesting. It made me think, and it was worth my time.