(TW rape? Maybe?)
I have to admit, I have never been one to fantasize about living along in the woods. As a child I’d occasionally climb a tree and perch for a few hours, but ultimately I knew I’d never hack it, nor would I want to. Mosquitoes seem preternaturally attracted to me, I have bad circulation that makes my fingers and toes go cold easily, and I generally enjoy the company of people. Even though I’m usually successful at making fires, no, there’s no way I’d want that.
Okay, that’s not really the point of Julie of the Wolves, but for most of the book, it seems to be that kind of story where yes, a child has gone through hardship that forces them into living by themselves in nature, but they really seem like they’re having fun with it. It’s the 1970s and Julie (aka Miyax, but the title calls her Julie so I’ll just go with that) has run away from home, trying to make her way to Barrow where she can catch a plane to San Francisco to meet, and presumably move in with, her pen pal. We open on her lost among a pack of wolves. She ran away just as winter was beginning, and quickly realized she did not have enough food or supplies to make it to Barrow before winter set in. I realize she is 13 and perhaps did not think this plan through well enough, but you’d think that a life in Alaska would at least pound in the message that WINTER IS BAD and you should do all you can to avoid being alone in it.
Julie, as the title suggests, is essentially adopted by a tribe of wolves after she learns to read their body language and communicate with them. The entire first chapter is her learning to speak to them, playing with wolf puppies, and having them bring food to her. It’s everything you want out of a YA book about a child living with animals, and an easy fantasy to fall into. Just think, instead of getting yelled at about your Algebra homework you could be rolling around on your belly and snuggling with baby wolves! Sure, she’s nearly starving to death and when winter comes the wolves abandon her and she’s left to eat boiled moss, but baby wolves!!!!
Then, we get to the flashback chapter. Julie’s mom died when she was very young, so she goes to live with her father, Kapugen, in a more traditional Eskimo lifestyle. Her Aunt Martha thinks he’s crazy for that, and when he goes out to fish one day and never returns, Julie is sent back to live with her Aunt Martha, who in general just seems to suck. Looking for a way out, she remembers her dad telling her when she turned 13 she could marry her godfather’s son, Daniel, and just chill with her godfather’s family for a while and not have to really be married.
And then her husband rapes her? I think. I’m not sure. He’s described as a “dumb” boy and his friends make fun of him for not having consummated the marriage, so he attacks Julie and the room goes fuzzy for her and Daniel jerks around and then stops. It’s awful, and comes as a total shock about 40 pages after baby wolves.
The rest of the book doesn’t get much better. The incident with Daniel is what makes her run away, and she is alone in the tundra when the wolves come back. Except then some people come up and shoot one of them from a plane. I cannot remember specifically which wolf, but it was one of the important ones, and it died. So then Julie is mourning this and she comes across some other people, who she gets to talk to, and who eventually figure out that her father is actually alive and well and living with Barrow. So she goes to meet her father, and discovers that he has married a white woman, set up his house with electricity, and hunts from a plane. Is there anything worse that can happen to her? I mean she has just been through some of the most harrowing experiences anyone could face and now she has to find out her dad is a fucking sellout? Oh wait, then her pet bird dies. Did I tell you she had a pet bird? It was her only other company and she goes to run away from her father and about five feet outside his house her bird dies, so she resigns to go live with him and learn English.
Look, I know that kids can handle some rough shit in books. But you know what? I can’t. I am a total baby when it comes to depressing plots. I Google endings like nobody’s business, and I still haven’t seen 12 Years a Slave because I know I just won’t be able to handle it. I’m the woman who asks her husband if he’d ever plot to murder me after every episode of Law & Order. I think this stuff is real. And when you present to me a 170 page cute little book about a young girl living with a pack of fluffy dogs I am going to expect some gentleness in the storytelling!!!
There’s maybe a reason I haven’t read other books like this, like Hatchet or Lord of the Flies. The only real familiarity I have with the genre is the Disney version of The Jungle Book, which makes the whole living among nature thing seem far more enjoyable. Julie of the Wolves does a good job of showing what it might be like for a savvy girl who actually knows how to do things like hunt and build shelter. It turns out all I want is to play with puppies.
Tags: jaya catches up, julie of the wolves, kids are tough man, why wasn’t this book just about wolf puppies, wolf puppies
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Speaking as an utter wuss who can’t watch GoT because of the violence, I LOVED this book and read it when I was probably…8? and I completely had forgotten about the horrifying rape part (I thought she somehow fought him off, and then she runs away, and I thought she was a total badass, and now that I think about it that could also have been my total ignorance of sex talking?)
Julie, for me, was an example of a tough woman, who fought for what she loved, and survived out in the wild and freezing cold, and also ate SO MUCH raw caribou meat, like whoa.
Question, if you’re a pretty sheltered child, as I was, do you think it’s possible for one’s ignorance of sexual violence or sex or what any of that actually feels like to protect you? I’m sure re-reading it now, as an adult, I would be horrified. (not saying a KID’S BOOK should have this kind of material in it. I just remember having a vague sense of “bad things happened to her and she persevered.”)
Yeah, I had no idea until years later that the book was alluding to rape. Went wayyy over my head. Otherwise I don’t know if I would have liked the book as much.
It must have gone right over my head, too – which is probably developmentally appropriate? I kind of think kids process what they can and deep-six what they’re not ready for.
Anyway, reading this made me realize I don’t remember this book’s plot at alllll, it sounds so horrible. Poor Julie.
That’s exactly my experience, yeah.
Ditto this. I read, and LOVED this book when I was about 8? But reading this review, it is clear that I had No Idea what it was about.
I’m a YA Librarian, and I have a lot of tween patrons who read pretty far above grade level, and oftentimes their parents are concerned about the content in some of these books. What I’ve found, though, is that even if kids are reading at a high level, sexualized or violent content kind of… I don’t want to say it goes over their heads, but it’s like they have no experience with it in their lives or their reading so far, so it doesn’t really register with them. They read the words almost skimming over the content sometimes, and just don’t take in the situation the way we might as adults, like their brains are protecting them.
This is how it was for me as a kid. I was a fourth grader with a high school reading level and you know, a fourth-grader’s perception of the world. I knew big words but the subtext of sexual violence went completely over my head.
Same, my school had this program where we had to check out library books that correlated to the reading level assigned to us by some bullshit computer test. As a result I was more-or-less required to stop reading age-appropriate books when I was around 4th grade. I read the Scarlet Letter when I was probably 11– it was one of the few books in our library that were categorized at my reading level. The school librarian, who was a nun, was very troubled that I had chosen to read a book with such “adult” themes, but joke’s on her, because I did not understand one single word of it.
I’m pretty sure it was deliberately ambiguous. I was old enough when I read it where I could sort of see it both ways. I was a child who read and reread and reread books a million times. Sometimes when I read it, he raped her. Sometimes she fought him off. It sort of depended on where my psyche was in the moment.
I definitely realized what was going on (or at least, trying to go on). I definitely was sheltered and ignorant of sexual violence (imagine a nice, upper-middle class suburban family who’s only skeleton involves a close relative killing a few people in an office. That’s us!) but once I realized BDSM was a thing I was like, “oh, that totally explains so much about my desires.” So, yeah, definitely noticed, definitely re-read that section dozens of times.
Oh my god I haven’t read this book since I was 12 or 13 but I can still remember that “Nyah-nyah, Dumb Daniel, he’s got a wife and he can’t mate her” part.
I just had the strongest wave of nostalgia at that.
Ok so I also loved this book and perpetually fantasized about running away to the north to live with a pack of wolves and I REMEMBERED NONE OF THIS. woops
Now I’m looking through Jean Craighead George’s bibliography and somehow I had forgotten that she wrote, like, half of my favorite childhood books. Did anyone ever read The Talking Earth? It follows the same basic path as Julie of the Wolves except this time the girl has to survive in the Everglades and she canoes around and makes friends with an otter. I sooo wanted that to be me, minus the part where she has to sleep in a creepy cave.
YES! Here for any discussion of the Talking Earth, which probably fed a lot of my childhood fantasies about having a Great Cat as a companion, because who doesn’t want to add a panther cub to the animal friends gang? But mostly I remember a feeling of such extreme devastation about the book, with the fire that sweeps through, and then the climactic hurricane. I had vague notions that she had not so much left society as she was the last girl on earth anywhere, even if she also eventually returns to her community(?)
Now that you mention it I have only the vaguest memories of then ending, but I think somehow (I guess as a result of the hurricane) she gets trapped under a piece of furniture, and for some reason that detail stuck out to me more than the disaster itself. Like, I thought it ended with her bravely escaping from underneath a dresser. Maybe I didn’t fully grasp the ecology message.
My aunt and uncle from *America* bought me this book when I was maybe eleven or twelve and I thought it was the most exotic thing ever, although I still am not sure about how to pronounce ‘lichen’. I also never realised about the rape, but reading your piece made me remember something about Daniel having fluffy hair on his upper lip that she hated? It must have registered with me on some level…
lie-ken!
if you are still wondering, I think it’s pronounced almost identically to “liken”
This was my favourite book as a kid! I’m not sure why but I adored it. The sequel was good, too, but not quite as good. If I remember correctly, it’s about Julie trying to protect the pack from hunters when they move closer to the town and her father redeems himself. BUT I did not realize until I looked it up now that there is a third book in the series. I think I’m going to have to try and track it down.
The third book was my favorite! It basically drops all the human characters and just follows a year or so in the life of the wolf pack Julie befriends in the first book and it was AWESOME.
It was!! When I was a kid (ok….and also now) I was (am) all about books where the plot is [Likeable Character] ditches Society and goes and lives in the woods/arctic tundra/island/desert/space.
YESSS Julie’s Wolf Pack (the third book) is awesome. Sweet Fur Amy was one of my early feminist role models.
Next up on Jaya’s Booklist of Childhood Trauma (and first book to ever make me cry): Where the Red Fern Grows.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Is it some kind of rule that fifth grade teachers have to read Where the Red Fern Grows to their students? I am still traumatized, 30+ years later.
My teacher in year 7 was on exchange from Colorado, and so she brought all these American books with her that aren’t typically found in Australian classrooms. She was the best out-aloud reader ever, and read Where the Red Fern Grows to us, I remember just being so riveted and also obviously traumatised by that book!
I still think I’d find it much worse now as an adult, though, sad animal stuff just kills me!
HER HUMAN FATHER MURDERED HER WOLF FATHER.
Amaroq, may you play with Rontu in literary dog heaven.
Omg Rontu ._.
I don’t remember it being her dad who killed him? I thought it was just like another dude with a plane?? I haven’t read it in years but I really hope it wasn’t her dad :(((((
I always interpreted it as being her dad, but now that you mention it, I guess that’s never made explicit. We know that Amaroq is shot by a hunter in a plane; then Miyax visits her dad’s house and sees a helmet and goggles on a chair, whereupon her dad remarks that hunting from planes is “the only way to hunt these days,” which causes her to freak out and run out of the house. My understanding was that she put two and two together in that moment, but maybe she was just upset that her dad participated in airplane hunting in general, not that he was Amaroq’s killer. From a narrative standpoint, though, doesn’t it make the most sense that (as Abbey put it) her human father murdered her wolf father?
I think it discusses it more in the second book and it becomes more clear that it was for sure her human!dad that killed wolf!dad 🙁
goddamn I did not remember this book being anywhere near this brutal. Like the plane shooting yes and some of the wolves being wolves but not the bits with Daniel or that ending what the hell
Same, I remember the plane shooting and that the end wasn’t all that happy but it did not register to me at the time (age 7? 8?) that there had been a rape scene. I do remember liking JotW way, way less than other teen survival books like Island of Blue Dolphins and Hatchet and so forth, though.
The strongest memory I have of Julie of the Wolves is that the cover taught me how to draw fur. I was all “okay, you just draw a bunch of tiny lines really close to each other.” And then the teacher liked my drawing of Julie in her fur coat. I remember nothing about wolves or Daniel or shooting wolves out of a plane.
I don’t remember most of the book, but I do remember getting to the part where the wolf is shot and running into my mother’s bedroom bawling my eyes out.
I think it’s important for kids to be exposed to slightly uncomfortable things and learn how to accommodate that sense, to toughen the skin a little, but christ that was a harsh plot twist.
Wow, I know that this was always on my list of favorite books as a kid, but I am only realizing now that I have no actual recollection of what it was about. I read both the other books in this series, too, and same.
Also, it always makes me think of two other favorites: ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS because girl getting stranded alone and surviving and eating weird things and befriending canines and wearing cormorant feathers and THE ENDLESS STEPPE because very cold.
Island of The Blue Dolphins is the only one of those three books that I remember reading – I should seek them out because I’ve always loved stories about ladies going off to live on their own (whether voluntarily or no) and then kicking at least partial ass at it. It’s a harmless way for me to indulge my own fantasy of living in the wilderness by myself (because I know I’d be terrible at it).
Omg!!! I forgot about the endless steppe!! The nitpicking!
What I remember most about this book is the wolves vomiting up food for her (from their “belly-baskets” I think the term was) and Julie being so pumped about it – saying something like “I won’t starve!” – and then happily making a stew out of the regurgitated meat. Urgh. Also, the rape scene. It was the first time I had ever encountered sexual content in a book, and I didn’t really understand what was happening, just that it was bad. My fellow classmates said that that scene was “gross” and it dawned on me that it was something more “adult” and serious than I thought, though I couldn’t quite put the pieces together. I was a really innocent pre-teen…
This book was my LIFE when I was young! (As were its sequels!) I still have them all, sitting dog-eared (haha) on my shelf in my apartment. I built snow caves for myself in the winter and would pretend I was one of the wolves. I think I liked it even more than other YA survival books because it was actually HARD to live in the wild. Even as a kid I thought that a lot of those protagonists had a way too easy time of it. (Looking at you, My Side of the Mountain kid.)
I’m so happy to read this comment. This book and its sequels were my life too. I wrote endless stories about wolf social politics and I even had a wolf alter ego for myself. I wonder nowadays why it meant so much to me; part of it might have been that, as an awkward, unpopular, socially anxious kid, I was drawn to the very clear-cut social rules of the wolf pack (though I’ve since learned that the whole alpha-omega hierarchy thing is mostly a human misconception and not scientifically accurate). Also, Alaska just sounded so beautiful! It’s still my number one dream vacation destination.
I also loved My Side of the Mountain, but totally agree with you that it was insufficiently hardcore. I reread it years later and couldn’t believe how much of it was just recipes and sewing patterns, like a freaking Martha Stewart magazine set in a tree.
“I wrote endless stories about wolf social politics and I even had a wolf alter ego for myself.”
ARE YOU ME?
(hugs)
My most embarrassing memory from middle school: I accidentally handed in a written paper on the back of which I’d doodled all my original wolf characters, labeled with names like Snow Berry. Worse yet, I handed it in not just to the teacher, but for PEER-EDITING. All my classmates saw it, and one of them very nicely complimented me on the drawings, which was somehow more mortifying than if they’d mocked me.
In junior high (I think? maybe high school?) we had a project in which we create a grammar book with illustrations that help teach the different parts of grammar – verbs, prepositions, etc. – and one of the drawings I made was of two wolves, one establishing dominance over the other and the submissive wolf showing its belly. All my classmates were like, “LOL you drew wolves having sex,” which was equal parts mortifying and infuriating. Mortifying because OMG sex! Infuriating because WOLVES DO NOT HAVE SEX IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THIS.
Although in retrospect my classmates probably didn’t give a shit.
Ha! I shared your fascination with dominance and submission during my wolf phase — there was something so compelling about it, wasn’t there? It would be interesting to poll the BDSM community and see how many of them went through a wolf phase too.
OMG I am SOO with you guys! I went through the exact same phase with wolves (and then big cats. Actually the obsession with big cats never really left). I used to doodle and draw too, and still have an old notebook of my sketches somewhere.
I read this in school as part of our required reading of a great number of Problem books — you know, protagonist has a Problem, such as developing diabetes, or losing a loved one, or a limb, or being trapped in an avalanche alone, or being adopted by wolves — things that any middle-class child in upstate NY could reasonably be expected to have to face at some point –
and I swear TO GOD that the way I remember the Daniel thing, it was as described above, arranged marriage, assault, running away, BUT THEN, the wolf pack, once they fully accepted her as one of their own, expected her to marry a nice young wolf, and she had to choose between fully committing to the wolf lifestyle and presumably having wolf pups of her own sometime soon (wolf husband lifespans being what they are) or returning to human land. that is how I remember the book.
I guess..that didn’t happen though
I’m sure there’s a fanfiction that goes that direction on FurAffinity somewhere.
alas for the meet-the-parents comedy that never was
This is one of my favorite books growing up. I remember the Daniel scene horrifying me (even though I didn’t think ‘rape’ back then probably just because it wasn’t in my vocabulary. I knew it was Bad though) but I’m pretty sure it was attempted rape, that he wasn’t successful. I remember he chants “I will” repeatedly while he runs away after she fights back.
I am also a huge baby about Sad stories, so it’s kinda surprising that a lot of my favorite books as a kid have such harrowing stuff happen in them. The Julie books (I loved them all), The Call of the Wild, etc. I’ve always been a lazy, non-outdoorsy kid so obviously I would not last more than a day in the wilderness, but I loved reading about kids who did (My Side of the Mountain is another one).
I must add: it seems like Jean Craighead George just made up or conflagrated Native and nature stuff in her Julie books, which is a shame. http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/iks/hail/JulieWolves.html
I think sometimes having sad or scary–or just difficult–books is literary catharsis for adolescents? Like, I could not have actually handled *living* Julie’s life, but reading about it lets us explore it and live it in a safe way, and then be able to move on.
Yes exactly!
So, we’re all pretty sure it was Sarah Palin hunting wolves from the plane, right?
Headcanon accepted.
Ahhhhhh I had forgotten but now I remember how many times I read these books as a child (did Julie and her dad, like, help a wolf and/or an elk give birth on the frozen tundra in the second one?? Or maybe the third one? Am I making that up? Did I imagine the eating of the placenta???)
On a completely different note, I wonder how much of the wolf romance/wolf politics/wolf social order discussed in these books had an impact on the influx of werewolf pack romance novels of the past few years.
I remember that placenta-eating scene too! I think it was a musk ox. (What IS a musk ox?)
These are musk ox…being hunted by arctic wolves…contains violence to musk ox calf…musk ox are perfectly happy at -50C in howling winds…underneath the long hanging hair is the finest/warmest underwool on earth: quviut. It is also the most expensive wool in the world…worth every penny. I still miss my quviut toque. Musk ox are notoriously grumpy and they taste delicious. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pb6Rke7jiTc
Oh man, I have the strongest nostalgia for these books! Looking back, I’m pretty impressed by the complexity of the ending, which is partly happy (she’s not going to starve to death in the wilderness! she gets reunited with her dad!) and agonizing (her dad might have killed her wolf dad! and even if he didn’t, he’s renounced a lot of the cultural traditions that mean so much to her, and that got her through this entire ordeal!). I think the sequels go into it a little further, and about her sort of reconciling her identity as Miyax with her identity as Julie.
Another, similarly-themed book I was always a big fan of was Nancy Farmer’s “A Girl Named Disaster,” which has a similar “young girl runs away from forced marriage, lives in the wilderness, communes with nature” trajectory, but is set in Mozambique in the 1980s.
AH! I loved A Girl Named Disaster! Its mythic fantasy elements were absolutely enthralling. She got to hang out with so many gods and spirits! As is often the case with these kinds of books, I felt a bit let down when Nhamo rejoined “civilization.”
Man, Julie of the wolves. I loved survival books (Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, assorted pioneer books, etc) but this one had a special place in my heart… because of the attempted rape scene. I probably re-read it dozens of times.
And now I’m in a 24/7 TPE exchange relationship with an amazing partner.
THANKS LITERATURE.
I really liked how this book did not make starving in the tundra seem fun. Like, she missed people, and she was hungry, and she was always walking a tightrope with the wolves. I liked how it was not painted as sustainable or workable at all.
My teacher in year 7 was on exchange from Colorado, and so she brought all these American books with her that aren't typically found in Australian classrooms. She was the best out-aloud reader ever, and read Where the Red Fern Grows to us, I remember just being so riveted and also obviously traumatised by that book!
I still think I'd find it much worse now as an adult, though, sad animal stuff just kills me!
I am clearly way more wimpish about books now than I was as a kid, because I loved this book and Hatchet and those type of books…but looking back, why did I like that stuff??! Probably because my life was very suburban and I was lucky enough to not have to deal with any sort of real life trauma, probably made the books seem more fantastical.
As an adult there is way too much horror is the world that I’m aware of, so now I only want to watch cartoons and read happy things, ha!
I am clearly way more wimpish about books now than I was as a kid, because I loved this book and Hatchet and those type of books…but looking back, why did I like that stuff??! Probably because my life was very suburban and I was lucky enough to not have to deal with any sort of real life trauma, probably made the books seem more fantastical.
As an adult there is way too much horror is the world that I'm aware of, so now I only want to watch cartoons and read happy things, ha!
Omg!!! I forgot about the endless steppe!! The nitpicking!
My third-grade teacher read us Stone Fox and cried when she got to the sad part. She said she cried every year when she read that book. Looking back, I think that's kind of awesome–showing us that it's okay to be emotionally involved with what we read.
I loved this book so much when I was younger. I remember loving the nature and animal descriptions, including one about lemmings, which I later learned wasn't true at all but based on some made up Disney documentary.
I loved this book, all of it, even heart-breaking parts. Of course my other favorite books were The Giver, and Number the Stars so I apparently had a thing for depressing children’s books.
I had to read this book in the 7th grade. The only thing I remember is the line from when she is introduced to her husband: “Don’t worry, he’ll be like a brother to you!” And our teacher trying to get us to realize what a husband can do that a brother can’t and that is why Julie was relieved to meet him, and then he raped her. That’s all I remember.
Ugh I read this book when I was too young because my teacher told me I was at an “accelerated” reading level. Looking back on it, I am surprised my teacher let me read it with the whole rape controversy. It is my understanding that is why this book is banned. I think it’s a fucking amazing book and I can’t wait for my own daughter to read it.
We were JUST talking about this book at book club last night– along with the influx of all of these survivalist stories that were really popular in the late 80s’ to mid 90s’.
God, I HATED Hatchet. Loved Julie. I think I thought, “FUCK this kid I do not care” *eye roll*
My fourth-grade teacher did that too, with 'Tuck Everlasting'! She said that she cried every year when she read the sad part, and while it was definitely disconcerting to see an adult crying, I think you're right.