How we go on

Tell the Wolves I'm Home - Carol Rifka Brunt (The Dial Press, 2012)

Some books seem to drain you completely, drawing out all sorts of emotional and psychic energy and replacing it with a sort of melancholic emptiness. And of course they tend to be beautiful, because I don't think that trick would work if there wasn't beauty.

It's the mid-1980s, and AIDS is a mysterious and terrifying scourge. And adolescence - as in pretty much every time people - is mysterious and terrifying. So June has it rough, and enters into a relationship with the only person who could possibly have loved her lost uncle as much as she did.

Except what makes the book work is that it's about a whole host of other relationships too. June and her uncle, sure, in flashbacks to the moments before he knew he was sick, or before she knew, or before the end came. And June and Toby, of course. But siblings are maybe more important - June and her sister, and June's mother and uncle. Growing up and changing puts more pressure on those relationships than perhaps any others.

All of which is a weak description of some of the forces that left me so wrung out. Not in a crying way, although it probably would have helped to weep, but in the way that stresses how much more beautiful are the souls that were cracked and broken, and then stitched and glued back together.