Review by Booklist Review
A story-within-the-story that explores the means of handling grief forms the thrust of this compact book. After Blue Baker's father dies, his school counselor tries to get him to write down and explore his feelings. I did it for a while, but it just seemed stupid. Instead, he secretly starts writing and drawing a story about a feral boy living alone in the woods. Blue's story which slashes into the narrative, the moody and ragged artwork a mirror for Blue's inner turmoil is interspersed with his struggle to cope with the loss of his father, run-ins with a bully, and difficulty reaching out to his mother and younger sister. The savage in his story is a violent, languageless creature who chases down, kills, and eats people who get too close. The line separating Blue and his imaginary savage becomes increasingly blurred, each bleeding into the other's world, leading to an inevitable, though earned, catharsis. Avoiding sentiment, this illuminating book captures the staggering power of raw emotions on young minds, and demonstrates the ways expression can help transform and temper them.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-9-Blue is scrawny and nice. He is harassed by a big, dumb, smoking boy named Hopper. Blue's father died suddenly when he was younger. To cope, he wrote a comic book about a feral boy who gets to express his anger and loneliness through violent revenge, something Blue can't or won't do. Then parts of the story merge with real life. The characters' conversations and relationships are believable. The story is so thin, though, that there's little chance to care about the players. McKean's tonal watercolor panels, which illustrate roughly half of the pages, are full of palpable rage-gorgeous, frightening, and highly effective images. They set an ornery, mysterious mood that Almond's lackluster story never quite matches. Though the prose is clear and simple, the pace, in an attempt to build mystery, is too methodical for so obvious an allegory. The phonetic spelling in Blue's comic indicates a child much younger than the novel's somewhat confusing chronology indicates.-Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
(Intermediate) "He had no famly and he had no pals and he didn't know where he come from and he culdn't talk." The savage is a product of Blue Baker's imagination -- or so he thinks. His father has died, and Blue has turned to writing a peculiar story about a savage kid, but the line between fantasy and reality blurs -- as it so often does in Almond's work -- when one night the savage visits the bully who has been hounding Blue unmercifully. This illustrated novella, a graphic novel within a novel, is grounded in the idiom and setting of northern England and recapitulates many familiar Almond motifs: the sensitive boy, the harassing bully, the family tested by illness or death, and the wild and mysterious creature. McKean's illustrations -- ink and watercolor rendered in various shades of black, blue, and green -- add an appropriately eerie touch. A welcome addition to Almond's body of work, The Savage should pique the interest of newcomers and satisfy devoted fans awaiting his next full-bodied novel.From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
