K. Ancrum grew up in Chicago, Illinois, under the illusory rigor of the Chicago public school system. She attended Dominican University to study fashion merchandising, but was lured into getting an English degree after spending too many nights experimenting with hard literary criticism and hanging out with unsavory types, like poetry students. Currently, she lives in Andersonville and writes books at work when no one is looking. You can find Ancrum at kancrum.com.
August and Jack have never lived in the same world. August is a misfit with a pyro streak and Jack is a golden boy on the varsity rugby team—but their intense friendship goes way back. It's something they keep for themselves, and they rely on each other for survival. When Jack begins to see increasingly vivid hallucinations, August decides to help Jack the only way he knows how—by believing him, and believing in the fantasy kingdom that erupts into the edges of the real world. Jack leads August on a quest to fulfill a dark prophecy, and together they alienate everyone around them as they struggle with their sanity, free-falling into a surreal fantasy world that feels made for them. In the end, each one must choose his own truth. Written with vivid intensity, The Wicker King explores a relationship fraught with tension, madness, and love.
Jack and August are extremely interesting characters. A big reason they're stuck in the situations they're in is due to the neglect they suffered from. It is such a big part of the novel that K. addresses it at the very end, imploring those who read who also suffer from neglect to know that it is not their fault. Due to the lack of parental or adult care, Jack and August have attempted to fill in each other's gaps—Jack allows himself to be taken care of, and August allows himself to become subservient to Jack. Not all the time, necessarily—K. does a wonderful job crafting this twisted relationship so that even when August and Jack are performing roles they never should have had to fill, readers can still see the love and friendship their relationship once was, and will always be.
On the back of the book, there were blurbs that made me think this book could be categorized as horror—and so I was expecting to be horrified, and I wasn't. Even so, you could say that there are some horrifying elements, but they occur from internal thoughts rather than external actions. There is also the idea of the novel being horrifying in a philosophical sense—wondering how far people will go for each other, whether Jack's world is real and the way he thinks it is, August's refusal to get Jack help are all certainly horrifying elements of this story. What is scary is watching the boys become so destructive to one another and themselves, while the adults all around them just watch and no one steps in. That's the real horror—that despite the few who care, no one cares enough to really act and save the boys from each other and themselves.
There were some elements of the book, though, that didn't necessarily impress me enough. The short chapters hindered my ability to tell Jack and August apart at the beginning, especially since time is warped in those earlier sections, and we're actually given a snapshot of the ending. The short chapters also didn't get me entirely invested in these characters until way closer to the end, when there was more at stake. I wasn't able to get interested in Jack's and August's stories, because the scenes were too short. I found myself wishing and wishing for more, and even diving into the Goodreads reviews to tell me what I was missing. Now, if I need to dive into Goodreads reviews to figure out what was going on, I know that's not necessarily a good sign for me. While I love and appreciate everything everyone else is saying online about this novel's strengths, I unfortunately just didn't catch them! I feel like if just the scenes had been longer, or had I read this when I was in high school, I would have been able to catch onto everything.
Finally, I don't want to take away from the actual art object of this book. As the themes get darker, and as August and Jack hit breaking point after breaking point, the pages physically get darker, until you're reading a book with black pages and white type. I don't know a whole lot about book publishing, but having to pull off something as artistic as that must have been challenging, and it is done really well! The novel was also scattered with doodles, fake documents, detention slips, mixtapes—all of which worked well to develop some of the themes or relationships in the book (the parental neglect, the importance of friendships, the strange world Jack is seeing, to name a few). The cover itself is also gorgeous, and the photographs of the two boys are effective. All of these elements strung together makes each photo haunting, makes each doodle mean more than just a scribble.
You can find more from K. Ancrum at kancrum.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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