Review of the Day: The Wrong Way Home by Kate O’Shaughnessy

The Wrong Way Home
By Kate O’Shaughnessy
Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
$17.99
ISBN: 9780593650738
Ages 9-12
On shelves now.

Nuance and complexity in books for kids can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, our children deserve only the best possible literature. We must fill them with stories full of three-dimensional characters. We should give them difficult and complicated situations, sometimes without easy answers. We have to be willing to show them (in developmentally appropriate ways, naturally) that the world is not black and white. By the same token, when you write a complex character into a book intended for a young audience, gatekeepers get very nervous. If your main character doesn’t display forthright and true thoughts and intentions from page one onward then the adults start to squirm. They start muttering things like “bad role model” and “what’s the message here?”. Even if your protagonist does learn and grow, some grown-ups just aren’t comfortable with where they started in the process. And if they don’t learn and grow? If they stay adamant in their awfulness? Well, forget about it. Funny books might be able to get away with that (looking at you, Diary of a Wimpy Kid) but definitely not the straight up fiction. And yet, some of the best books for kids I’ve ever read have starred kids with wrong-headed ideas or notions or thoughts or beliefs. Sometimes that’s obvious to the child reader. And sometimes, as in the case of The Wrong Way Home, it can come to them as a complete surprise.

Imagine you were plucked from the only place you’ve ever truly considered your home. Your kidnapper? Your own mother. Fern’s lived on The Farm for most of her life and she’s happy there. They’re self-sustaining, agrarian, and they have very little contact with the outside world. But one day Fern’s mother takes that all away. They get into a car and drive completely across the country to a motel on the shore of the ocean. That’s when her mom breaks it to her: they’re never going back. Worse still, they have to live here now and Fern has to attend school for the first time in years and years. Determined to prove herself to the people she left behind, particularly The Farm’s leader Dr. Ben, Fern decides to figure out where they are and learn how to contact them. But as she places more distance between herself and her old life, Fern may begin to understand that maybe there was more to The Farm than she ever truly imagined.

A child who has never encountered an unreliable narrator may be utterly unprepared for when that moment occurs. It can be a good thing. It can throw them off, make them more susceptible to enjoying the book, and it can stay in your memories for a long time. But there are two types of unreliable narrators I’m talking about here. There’s the narrator who knows that they are purposefully misleading their audience. Then there’s the narrator who has no idea that they are in the wrong. Fern belongs squarely in the latter category. Her beliefs are based on what, she would be more than happy to tell you, are cold hard facts. The Farm offered her and her mom the first stability that they’d had in years. The people there were nice to her. They believed in good things like sustainability and helping the environment. And yes, sometimes there was tragedy, like a kid sent off on their initiation dying, but since Dr. Ben can explain such things away, it’s okay. Right?

Now an adult reading this book is probably going to catch on pretty quickly that something strange is going on. The book begins with Fern knitting in a circle of women. Dr. Ben comes in and we are told that he’s the leader of their community. He then does these very subtle little power plays. So subtle that if you aren’t looking for them, you might miss them. Stuff like observing the knitting the girls are doing and offering thoughts on their improvement. When he speaks to Fern and tells her that he’d like her to undergo some kind of coming-of-age initiation, your antennae goes up and you begin wondering (if you’re an adult) what year this takes place. By the time you realize it’s in the present day you’re on high alert. Kids, however, may be listening more to what Fern’s reactions are to all these events. We’re seeing the book through her eyes. As such, the child reader is going to be inclined to trust their narrator. If she says that her mom is unreliable and Dr. Ben is infallible, they’ll listen. But going into this book I didn’t know a thing about it, and the escape from The Farm (I almost wrote “the compound”) had my “CULT!” alarm systems blaring out like mad. The word “cult”, for that matter, does actually appear in this book, but it takes a good 242 pages to get there. And the child reader is entirely on Team Fern for much of this text.

I sometimes wish I could have read a book for kids that I’ve encountered today as a child myself. This is one of those books. At what point does the average reader figure out that Fern may be in the wrong? When do their loyalties switch to the mom? Do they ever? While the adults amongst us are screaming “DON’T GET IN THAT VAN!” at the book, do kid readers feel the same way? I can’t help but think that this book would be an amazing bookclub read with children. Their reactions would be incredible.

For the record, I found this book utterly believable as well. O’Shaughnessy seems to have a particular talent for couching her world in reality. Dr. Ben’s background was kid-appropriate and yet still bad. The economics of The Farm makes perfect sense. You can see how these people could, even in this modern day and age of surveillance, still fall through the cracks. I flipped to the back of the book to see if the author talked about her research process at all. Mind you, as an adult reading this book, I got the distinct impression that Fern only saw certain aspects of The Farm that the adults hid from her. There may be more sordid stories found there that she never learns. I had little bit more difficulty understanding why Fern’s mom didn’t share with Fern early on some of the problems with The Farm and, specifically, Dr. Ben, but in retrospect I suppose it makes a fair amount of sense. After all, all you have to do is see Fern’s reaction when her only friend in town tells her she thinks she was in a cult. It does not go well.

It’s rare that I encounter a book featuring an active protagonist who uses their brain to solve their problems and whom you find yourself rooting AGAINST. O’Shaughnessy even manages to make you like Fern, though she exhibits some pretty unlikable behaviors for the bulk of the book. It’s a cleverly written and supremely literary story, while also remaining pretty gripping in its telling. Trust me, you won’t know what hit you after you finish it. Consider The Wrong Way Home for any kid who is ready to doubt everything they ever knew about narrators.

On shelves now.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2024, Review 2024, Reviews