WILDLIFE

A story about first love, friendship and NOT fitting in by the author of the critically-acclaimed Children’s Book Council of Australia Best Novel nominee SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS.

Today I am starting at a new school. This school is a privileged private school that sends its students away for a whole term. It is a campus in the mountains. This cushy campus promises to provide an authentic, rugged outdoors experience…resilience…core values…practical skills for… living…blah…educational adventure…foster…blah…connect…blah…challenge. It will be good for me. Good to make a new start. Good to get out of the house. Good to meet new people. Good to breathe some new air. Good to be getting fit. Good to have access to a fine counsellor. So good I cannot fucking believe my luck.
Following on the heels of her CBCA-nominated SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS (in its sixth printing since its publication in 2010), WILDLIFE is an absolutely page-turning contemporary that follows two teens, strangers to each other at first, through a semester at a boarding school in the wilderness that turns out to be life-altering for both. I believe that this book will launch Fiona in the United States and make her as beloved to US readers as she already is in Australia.
Nerdy Sibylla (Sib) has always been overlooked in favor of her attention-seeking best friend, Holly, and she’s never really cared. But just days before 16-year-old Sib and her class leave for their semester in the great outdoors, her image is plastered across the biggest billboard in their city as the face of a new perfume. Her new fame captures the attention of gorgeous Ben Capaldi at a party and propels Sib at warp speed into a confusing relationship with him that isn’t helped by over-the-top coaching from Holly on how to be a good girlfriend. Lou is the new girl in school. Although she presents an inscrutable face to her classmates, on the inside she struggles to make it through each day. Reeling from the death of her boyfriend, she has spent nearly a year in “blind disbelief, blank chaos, and therapy” and has been sent on the wilderness semester because her therapist thinks it will do her “a world of good.” She resists most attempts at friendship, but to her surprise, she finds herself drawn to Sib’s oldest friend, Michael, a full-on genius who is pathologically, sometimes cripplingly, anxious. Struggling to cope with school-life-in-the-wild that includes daily runs, chores, studying Shakespeare’s Othello, and her feelings about Ben, Sib turns away from the one person who can give her much-needed perspective, Michael. In the meantime, Holly tires quickly of reflected glory and prepares to put herself back in the spotlight. When Lou discovers the extent of Holly’s Iago-like plans, and the collateral damage that follows, she must make a choice: remain locked inside herself or finally speak out. And while Sib may learn her way around a compass and a campsite, it’s a line from another Shakespeare play -- “To thine own self be true” -- that will be the message she's meant to learn this semester. The question is: which self? Sibylla the supermodel or Sib the nerd girl? Or maybe she's someone else altogether?

Fiona Wood is a television screenwriter and novelist. SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS (Pan Macmillan, 2010) won the 2008 Eleanor Dark Fellowship for fiction and the Readings Foundation Glenfern Fellowship in 2009. She lives in Melbourne with her husband. WILDLIFE is her second novel and will be published by Pan Macmillan in Australia and New Zealand in March.