You could easily be forgiven for thinking that, what with me not having posted since the 4th of August and already being a week in arrears, I'd given up on the challenge for the second time. In fact, that was exactly my line of thought up until yesterday. I'd spent my summer, a grand total of 5 weeks off no less, having days out and days in, primarily spending as much time as possible with my loved ones. With the fear of the return to schools' new normals and the very dark cloud of future lockdown hovering in the distance, I sought to spend as much time as possible being active and enjoying myself: as a result I hardly engaged in the solitary act of reading at all.
Every time I picked up a book and tried, there was always some sort of happy distraction. Like a magpie, I followed it as though it were a shiny trinket. I am not ashamed to say that reading was at the bottom of my list of priorities. With that came the grim responsibility in the September weeks that I might never be able to catch up with the posting to get back on track. Isn't it funny how life works?
Isn't it also funny what two weeks of being stuck in a single room, unable to go out and interact with people at all, can do for you?
I have had this book since it was first released in 2017. I'd been sauntering through my local Waterstones, looking to spend some hard earned vouchers when I came across it on one of their brightly displayed fiction tables. The fuss over it seemed to be big, it had an interesting cover and a good concept: I was sold.
Three years (and all the stuff that came with it) later and I still hadn't sat down to read it. That was what I started to do in August. At a fairly harmless 240 pages it seemed like I'd get through it in no time, that was my big mistake.
The story of Wed Wabbit centres on Fidge (why do main characters always have eccentric first names?) Fidge has a little toddler aged sister called Minnie, who is always lumbered with her beloved trop of teddies and toys. The most important of these is her Wed Wabbit, so called because Minnie can't yet pronounce the letter 'r'. Fidge hates Wed Wabbit and treats him and her own family members quite coldly at the start of the book (I won't tell you why... ...spoilers). But a devastating accident, caused partly by Fidge's irresponsible actions leads Minnie into hospital and Fidge into Minnie's make believe world of the Wimbley Woos.
Fidge arrives in this sudden make believe land with her cousin Graham who has a phobia of just about everything. With the help of Graham's transitional object and Ella the talking elephant, they must save the land of the Wimbleys by confronting a certain fluffy tyrant with floppy ears.
I found the characters of Fidge and Graham to be incredibly well rounded. There's a paragraph at the beginning where we see Fidge unable to return a hug from her own mother and in her inaction we see a heartbreaking element of her personality. Graham's fear of everything is the very real symbol of a culture of over diagnosis and 'wrapping children in cotton wool'. How he copes with it is the author's comment on the real world and how it should deal with the issue of sheltered children.
The backstory was not so strong and I think that's what made the story hard to stick to. The cause of the breakdown in Fidge's relationship with her own family members has been written in many modern books before. I didn't feel for Fidge's, or Minnie's plight. It sounds harsh of me to say but I'm coming across a running theme in around two thirds of the stories I'm reading geared for children aged 8 - 14.
It's the same thing almost every time and it's become the acceptable reason for any character's deep and unending struggle. I'll be writing a separate post about it at some stage as it's beginning to be a real bug bear.
On the whole though, the writing style saved the story, I very nearly made this a blog post about the first book I read but didn't finish. But I'm pleased to say that having proper free time to myself and the perseverance to match the characters in this story, that I got it finished this morning.
Here's hoping I can catch up and finish this challenge! Expect a flurry of posts as I get into some serious reading!
Book 19 of my 52 books and I book that I owned, but up till now, never read.
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