I absolutely love this book. It's about a little girl who lives in the woods with the animals. One day, a family finds her and brings her home. They try to make her 'normal'--speaking correctly, playing with toys nicely, taking a bath, etc. She becomes very VERY unhappy and eventually completely destroys their house. AND THEN THEY PUT HER BACK IN THE WOODS! I thought that was absolutely hilarious! They were just like 'you know what, you're obviously not happy here. Your feelings are valid. You belong in the woods.' I can see how some parents may see this as promoting bad behavior to get what you want, but I see it more as 'everyone has feelings and thoughts, they might be different from yours, and that's okay. You should let everyone be themselves, even if it seems strange to you. Just because it's strange doesn't mean it's wrong.' It was also not lost on me that the girl exhibits behaviors often associated with Autism and other IDDs--nonverbal, struggles to express her feelings, plays with toys differently than expected, vocalizes in 'unusual' ways, etc. I love this book. So much. ( )

The main character's face is very, very expressive. The art in this book is just beautiful...so detailed and wonderful! It's about a little girl somehow abandoned in the forest, who is taken in by the forest creatures and lives a happy, feral life. Until one day she's discovered by some hipster hunters (or, I guess, they caught her in their bear trap? Only her hair was caught but that's pretty harsh, hipsters. Is using a bear trap really sporting? They take her to live with Famed Psychiatrist and his wife (presumably I'm supposed to assume the man is Famed Psychiatrist because he's the one measuring her head and taking notes while the lady just brushes the kid's hair and tries to cut her meat...but technically the lady could be Famed Psychiatrist while her significant other is her assistant. But I don't think I'm supposed to think that) and they just get mad at her for not learning even though it doesn't look like she's been there very long and so when she runs away they're just like "good riddance" which will be hard to explain to the papers but whatever. Famed Psychiatrist's dog and cat escape with our friend as well and live happy lives in harmony with the animals of the forest because this is a magical forest where predator and prey hang out and don't kill each other. I don't know what the bears and foxes eat but that's not the point of this story - the point is, you do you. I really like the magic in this book actually, because I would love to imagine that there are forests that exist where all the animals love each other and never die and people can have plants for hair. Probably somewhere in Europe.

ETA: of course I know what the bears and foxes eat, because there was a whole page dedicated to it that I apparently forgot, they eat fish. Sorry fish, you don't belong in our happy family of animals! ( )

Really loved this. The illustrations were full of details, all the way to the edges of each page. The exploration of how different environments and lifestyles work for different people, rather than the more typical wild --> civilized = happy narrative, is convincing and much needed right now. ( )

Tells the story of a little girl who has known nothing but nature from birth. Bears taught her to eat, birds to speak, foxes to play; she is unabashedly, irrefutably, irrepressibly wild, until one day when she meets a new animal that looks oddly like her. ( )

Raised in the wild by the animals of the forest, a young human girl is taught to speak by the birds, to eat by the bears and to play by the foxes. Then she is 'discovered' by two creatures just like her, who remove her from the forest and try to make her live like them. Their efforts prove futile in the end, however, and she returns to the wild, where (the narrator informs us) she belongs...

This debut from Hawaiian-born author/artist Emily Hughes put me strongly in mind of Marianne Mayer's The Boy Who Ran With the Gazelles, which also tells the story of a feral child who cannot be reclaimed by humanity after his many years running wild. Unlike so many other online reviewers (and perhaps even in contradiction of the creator's intention), I wasn't able to read Wild as affirmation of the beauty of the wilderness. Rather, I took away the message that human culture is a terribly fragile thing, one easily undermined and permanently lost, if a person's early childhood is too traumatic, or if they are separated from the rest of humanity at too young an age. There are a number of true stories from the pages of history and current events, both concerning feral children raised in the wild, and children raised in isolation by abusive human adults, that indicate that it is difficult to overcome such early experiences, and learn language, culture, and normal human behaviors. Intentional or not, this reads as a tragedy to me, albeit a beautifully-illustrated one, and I found myself scratching my head a bit at the many reviewers who seem oblivious to this, and parrot the "sometimes things are meant to be wild" line. I doubt they'd abandon their own infants in the forest, so they're no doubt reading this figuratively, rather than as an actual feral child story.

Responses will vary, of course, so I recommend people pick this one up and read it themselves, to see what they think. ( )