👏🏾👏🏾Review: Wild World by Peter Rush 👏🏾👏🏾
Wild World by Peter S. RushMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
What I liked?
The book takes us back to the Vietnam War as well as the Kent State shootings and the protest era in general. The author explores this time in our history through fictional characters, their lives, and how they decide to combat this deeply unpopular war. However, despite the fictionalized accounts of characters such as Steve Logan, a student at Brown University who makes the decision to fight the war by protesting from the inside, the emotion is there.
The story overall hit hard. When one of the characters, Roxy, says during the aftermath of one protest “I’m so afraid. What’s going to happen next?” or when Steve Logan wonders if everything he’d learned about his country was wrong because “these were executions like in some Third World dictatorship,” you feel that.
With Steve in particular, you can see him going from confusion to realization that the hate and corruption going on around him is just wrong. Peter Rush writes it all in a way that you hurt just as much as he does.
What I didn’t like?
Roxy, who was Steve’s love interest in the story, really got on my last nerve. There are things that you just don’t do when you’re in a relationship with someone who is trying to do right by you and simultaneously make a difference in the world. She was much too childish for me to find her the slightest bit redeemable.
Overall?
This book won the 2018 Beverly Hills Book Award for Social/Political Change and I can definitely see why. While it doesn’t necessarily build to a specific climax, it is a book that tells the story of a time in history that we’ve seen in documentaries, history books, and the like. But Peter Rush, through this fictionalized account, relays the same historical insight with feeling. It’s lit and I’d recommend giving it a read.
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