Home in the Woods is a literary gem of recent creation. Published in 2019, the book, written and illustrated by Eliza Wheeler, tells the story of a widow and her eight children living in a shack in Wisconsin and making do on meagre means. The resulting work is inspiring and reassuring, a story of fortitude and resilience in the face of great adversity.
A child’s memories
Told from the perspective of the six-year-old girl, Marvel, the story beautifully captures a child’s perspective, leaving out the grim details of surviving in these circumstances and embellishing the happy moments with elements of surrealism (the feast of wild turkey and whimsical winter days around the fire come across as far more luxurious than they likely were). There is a hint of the burden on the mother, called “Mum,” with an image of all the children asleep while she stayed awake late in to the night “whispering to the stars.”
The story behind the story
Reading through the book the first time, the story can seem a bit contrived and unlikely. Could a mother adequately feed so many children with jars of berries and vegetables and a pittance earned from domestic work in town? However, an author’s note at the end of the book includes details from the real-life story of the author’s grandmother Marvel, who at the time of publication, was still alive at 93-years-old. Marvel, along with her three still-living siblings, contributed to the book with their lively telling of the experience from their childhood memories and hand-drawn sketches of their home as they recalled it.
This is a book that respects the reader, even young ones, with a simple and direct style. The position of the family is difficult, and the narrator does not gloss over this. Remaining true to the perspective of the young girl narrating, we don’t learn about the small Mother’s Pension provided by the government and assistance of charitable neighbors mentioned in the author’s note. For the nosy adult, these provide some interesting context for the story.
Vitality in the midst of struggle
The focus of the story, though, is of course not what the family ate for every meal but how they lived. For the siblings, the weighty responsibility of life without their father during the Great Depression was cushioned with times of freedom to roam through the foods and to play imaginative games. For example, the hunger they likely experienced is offset by a time of plenty berry-picking in the woods around the home.
After the children visit the general store and unable to buy any of the fancy clothes and toys with the modest sum their mother earned, they invent a game in which leaves are money and they can buy anything they want. Young children reading the book will likely be inspired create their own store game, a testament to Wheeler’s ability to convey a child’s experience. The page depicting the beloved game is reminiscent of the charm of Roxaboxen, one of the most whimsical stories of a children’s game long-remembered with fondness.
As an interesting aside, today we would likely refer to “Mum” as a “single mother.” This would not be accurate. She is a widow, and the family’s grief and healing are marked by their father’s death rather than voluntary absence. While the story does not give any background to the partially furnished shack in which they settle, the author’s note includes the touching detail that following eviction from the family home, Marvel’s father, wracked with cancer, moved the family’s belonging to an abandoned shack before he died.
A word about the illustrations
Wheeler, who was influenced by her love of the four season in the Midwest, portrays the changes of the year with many subtle details. The emotional growth over the course of the book is subtly indicated with increasing addition of color to the grayscale and drab style.
Some of the illustrations are peculiar and overwrought, in part it seems a function of the technical enhancements to Wheeler’s craft. The people are more cartoon than real-life, which can be chalked up to a matter of preference. These are no Pre-Raphaelite human figures of beauty and accurate detail, which is objectively a superior and more interesting style. The cartoonish quality is most pronounced in the illustrations that feature detailed drawings of local flowers. Unlike Cicely Mary Barker, who created both realistic children and realistic botanicals, Wheeler’s world does not offer this kind of stunning realism.
A human story
Like other works in the Books Worth Reading series, Wheeler’s story excellently transmits oral history preserved through three generations of a family. As Wheeler writes, “This book is inspired not only by the stories of their [her grandmother and great-aunts and great-uncles] childhood, but by the entire generation that experienced the Great Depression. They will soon be gone, and if we haven’t yet collected their stories, the time is now.” As an oral history recalled by people who were children at the time, as previously mentioned, the story is not fact-focused and hyper-realistic. This is, naturally, its charm.
In these qualities, the story has interesting parallels to the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Ingalls family has been ridiculed by many readers for putting themselves in extraordinarily difficult situations, always struggling for the necessities of survival. Whether the family’s decisions were in fact reckless is one not answered by the perspective of the child Laura offered in the books. Regardless, the resilience and ingenuity demonstrated by the Ingalls family has endeared them to countless readers.
Marvel’s family in Home in the Woods faces many of the same challenges as the Ingalls family, including the long, difficult winter of Wisconsin, but the tragic circumstances of their homelessness cannot be construed as a choice. In their difficult situation, Mum and her children display the same fortitude as the Ingalls family and, above all, the attitude and character to rise to the challenge. Wheeler writes about her grandmother’s story, ““What an incredibly hard time it must have been, and yet they recall the memories from those years as some of their best. They all had purpose and found inventive ways to work together and make it fun.”
Some readers interpret Home in the Woods as a story that shows “hard things don’t stay hard forever.” One reviewer took “hard things” to be societally-imposed self-isolation with the internet, an abundance of delivery options, and a credit card. Whether this analogy is apt is perhaps open to question, but it reveals how transformative and inspiring a story like Wheeler’s can be. Whatever difficulty you face, the story of people who displayed character in the face of challenge inspires excellence and perseverance.
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