The Horn Book has featured Wake the Wild Creatures on its 2025 Summer Reading List, in the Summer Reading for High School section.
If you’re planning to visit the Catskills at any point this summer, do you want to read about a community of fugitive women and girls occupying a dilapidated former Borscht Belt hotel hidden in the forest and the girl who’s captured from this place after her mother, the founder of this community, is arrested for murder? Thank you to The Horn Book for featuring the book!
Here’s what they said about the book:
“In the present-day timeline of this psychological mystery, sixteen-year-old Talia is desperate to return to the isolated community where she was raised. Flashback sections cover life at the Neves, an abandoned hotel at a once-grand Jewish resort hidden in the Catskills that becomes a self-sustaining commune and underground haven for abused women and daughters. Elements of magic and surrealism dip in and out of the story with a lush atmosphere and breathtaking setting.”
You’ll find some magic in this book connected to the natural world, you’ll find my musings on running away from society, and you’ll enter pockets of the forest I used to run wild in when I was a child.
Here is the full list of recommended books for High School.