Customer Reviews

Wildwood

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I met Drusilla Campbell recently in California and purchased a signed copy of Wildwood. I was surprised after I read her book, that, by her own admission, she experienced difficulty getting published in the literary genre, since her characterization of three very different women is amazing! Apparently publishers didn't want her to jump from the romance market to the literary genre. I, for one, am glad she persevered and found the right agent to market her book. As a struggling novelist myself, I will study her book further, to improve my own mastery of the literary devices she's used, such as metaphor and simile, as well as her original, lyrical descriptive settings of northern California. She's accomplished many tasks masterfully in Wildwood. She moves the plot at a wonderful clip and manages to write from three different characters' points of view, each woman unique in experiencing her own growth and ephiphany.
I read this novel in two days and was sooooo reluctant to leave the three friends, Hannah, Liz, and Jeanne, when the book ended. It's my hope that Drusilla has other quality literary novels like this in the works!

My friend brought me this book, said she'd read it all the way through on her flight to see me. I didn't believe her. Then I started reading and found myself unable to stop. I was captivated by all of the characters, saw some of myself in each of the women. I loved that it wasn't predictable, as so many books are now. This is a great book club read - really brings out discussion.

While it took me fifty pages to get into the book, once I was there, I was hooked. I found myself to be reading through the night, absolutely intent to find out how the now-adult relationship would play out for Liz,Hanna, and Jeanne. It is a new twist on the coming-of-age novel. A twist that all of us who have maintain grade school friendships have or will have to journey through as we enter adulthood. Campbell writes with precision without taking away from the reader's own introspection. Perhaps one of the best Campbell has written and I have read them all!

In her dashing novel *Wildwood* Drucilla Campbell weaves an alluring, highly complex tale of three still-young women who find release from a horrible event shared some 30 years past. During the intervening years they've all lived quite different lives--two have remained close to home, the third has lived abroad--and it is she who returns for a visit and provides the ultimate catalyst for dramatic resolutions.

There are many aspects in Ms. Campbell's novel to intrigue us: a curious private school and a tenebrous nature-place of crime are provocative old hometown venues; the maddeningly relentless drought--a seemingly "judgmental" withholding of rain--serves as a puissant metaphor; and then there is the ever-surfacing mystery of a missing piece of intimate clothing, which is a key to their life-changing mystery. And of course there are the relationships between the women themselves--and their men--all inextricably wound together like tangled roots of old trees. These relationships are charged, and psychodynamically layered (especially interesting to me, a NYC psychotherapist), and all are portrayed with marked originality and truly extraordinary perspicacity.

On the way, there are delightful tidbits and dividends: a wonderful run through Paris; an engaging ear for the patois of the youth involved; and loads of good southern California.

Read *Wildwood*. Read it because it's immensely entertaining; read it because it's incredibly edifying.

Speaking as a male who reads (& writes) mainly non-fiction, WILDWOOD was as suspenseful, insightful, engaging, and well crafted a novel as I've read in years. At the same time I was swept up by its plot, I learned more about life and women than I have in (too many) years! Signed, Arthur Waldron.

Preadolescent Hannah Whittaker is painting her toenails at Bluegang Creek in Rinconada, California hoping her friends Liz and Jeanne will join her. When fifteen year old Billy Phillips arrives he starts making sexual advances to the twelve year old girl. She gets frightened and pushes him. His head hits some rocks and he dies. When her friends come and sees Billy's body, Liz wants to tell somebody in authority but Hannah and Jeanne talk her out of it.

Four decades later Liz returns to Rinconada to see her two friends she regards as family and to have an abortion. All her life Liz ran from commitment and even though she has been living with Gerard for seven years she's afraid to marry him. Hannah, who has two teenagers, wants to adopt a crack baby and Liz's unborn child to the point of desperation. Jeanne is married to the man she loves but fears that he will leave her; she also resents his tomcatting around and that he influenced her into giving up for adoption their three month old son. Will a four-decade friendship survive the surprising revelations that surfaces or will the truth destroy their sisterhood?

This is a very absorbing tale that focuses on the lives of three women. They made and make mistakes, feel guilt over an incident that happened almost forty years ago, and their quest for redemption surfaces in strange and tragic ways. This is more of a character study than an action drama but women of all ages will be able to identify with the problems these women face. Drusilla Campbell is a wonderful storyteller who probes into the human psyche with some uncanny insights.

Harriet Klausner

This is a terrific tale of choices, and of the durability of friendship. As girls, these women share a wrenching experience, and over the ensuing years, make choices about their lives testing the strength of their loyalty to eachother and their current relationships. As a book for a reader's group, there are meaty issues of loyalty, love, motherhood, compromises and choices that are sure to yield lively discussion and memories of old friends.

Druscilla Campbell, the author of "Wildwood" did it. She made me care about the three characters and best friends, Hannah, Jeanne, and Liz, when I had enough to care about like my family, a baby on the way, job, etc. She hooked me from tbe first page until the last. Druscilla has an uncanny ability to get inside her characters heads and make them real. More than that, she gives each one of her characters a real and distinct voice; one that leaps out at you from the page. These voices push you along, leading you to the end. A good book makes you examine yourself and those around you. Do I have friends that will last 40 years? Could we endure a similar secret of "Bluegang Creek" like Hannah, Jeanne, and Liz? Not only did I love reading this book, but it got me thinking which is the best kind of book.

Drusilla Campbell has captured the moods and personalities of her three main characters in a way that makes the reader feel that they are all friends. She shows how one traumatic event in their childhood has affected all three of them in different ways as they rejoin each other years later. Her descriptions and insights into people are very apt and fresh. This is a book that you will not want to put down once you begin to read it. I enjoyed it immensely!!!

This is the 1st book I have bought from this author. I love it, keeps you interested of what is to happen next. Easy to read and follow. I like the fact that it brings back memories from many years ago. Woolworths, painting toenails (meaning you are not a lady),reading books our parents would not let us read (True Confessions). It makes me laugh as it brings back pleasant memories of a time when life was simple. You would have to be over 50, I believe to appreciate it. Although what happened to Hannah and the choices her friends make is questionably, of whether they did the right thing at the time. The 3 different characters could be my best friends or sisters; each one grows up to be very different. You can feel the jealousy between Jeanne and Hannah.Hannahs wanting a baby to take care because her own kids are teenagers, or perhaps she is middle age. Not sure I like her husband. You can relate to what friendship is and what marriage is after many years. Feels like true to life situations. Can't wait to get some of her other books.