Review: Feral Youth - Shaun David Hutchinson

Feral Youth
Shaun David Hutchinson
Series: n/a
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Retelling
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Goodreads

At Zeppelin Bend, an outdoor education program designed to teach troubled youth the value of hard work, cooperation, and compassion, ten teens are left alone in the wild. The teens are a diverse group who come from all walks of life, and they were all sent to Zeppelin Bend as a last chance to get them to turn their lives around. They’ve just spent nearly two weeks learning to survive in the wilderness, and now their instructors have dropped them off eighteen miles from camp with no food, no water, and only their packs, and they’ll have to struggle to overcome their vast differences if they hope to survive.

Inspired by The Canterbury Tales, Feral Youth features characters, each complex and damaged in their own ways, who are enticed to tell a story (or two) with the promise of a cash prize. The stories range from noir-inspired revenge tales to mythological stories of fierce heroines and angry gods. And while few of the stories are claimed to be based in truth, they ultimately reveal more about the teller than the truth ever could.

"Nothing we did mattered because, to our families, we were only what we'd done to get sent here. It's all they would ever see."

This is their last chance. Each one of these "feral youth" have committed so sort of crime, and have landed themselves on the wrong side of the law. This camp is their chance to "rehabilitate" themselves, and avoid greater punishment. Anthologies are hit or miss for me, but I would put this is the "hit" column for me. This collection was very cohesive, and that common thread is what grabbed me and kept me reading. I liked that this last-chance survival group was filled with people from different socioeconomic groups, with different skin colors, with different sexual preferences, and from different types of families. I liked that diversity, because it showed that we are different, but we are the same. We all make mistakes. We all hurt. We all feel pain and loss.

"Whether a story is true isn't important if you're hurting all the same because of it."

I liked the variety in the storytelling. Some stories read like an oral history. They appeared to be a true retelling of the events, while others hid the truth in fiction behind horror, lore, and mythology. These stories were not realistic, but I could find the "truths" that were concealed within the tale.

"If you keep feeding the fire, it will grow and wait to devour you. You don't realize it until it's too late."

Two stories stood out for me. I found Marieke Nijkamp's story very powerful. It was split in two parts, and after reading the first part, I already knew what was going on in that character's life. The power was in what she said without actually coming out and saying it. It was the feelings she evoked and the sadness that wrapped around me. I also loved Suzanne Young's piece. I think I may have fist-pumped at one point, because she was saying things that I have felt for so long regarding the way young women are treated by society.

"My crime is being female in a place that values male education over mine."

There were many good, even great, compelling tales shared by the different  authors, however, I attribute this really working for me because of the parts that came in-between each story. We had a great narrator, and it was the overarching story, which gave greater meaning to each of the short stories contained therein. These in-between parts are where we learned a little more about each character, and also where we learned more about what really happened. We also saw how the characters were changing over those three days during those connecting parts, and I really believe that is what elevated this anthology for me.

"I don't know how much of what any of them said was the truth, but it doesn't matter because the truth doesn't exist in our words but in the spaces between them."

**I would like to thank the publisher for the advanced copy of this book. Quotes are from an ARC and may change upon publication.

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