Wolf’s Belly by John August and Simón Estrada (illustrator) is a fairly intense, unique but also familiar, graphic novel. It has a narrator voice, but is told from the perspective of the girl with the red cape (we always forget her name). So, to make sure she gets her due, we learn her name is Lu (Little Red Riding Hood), and in a turnabout, her parents and many siblings have no names. They have actions or a personality (her mother is a great warrior, her father a balloonist, a brother is a wood cutter, another a baker, one sister sings like the angels, the other two are terribly academic and creative).
Lu decides she wants a legacy as well, and dons her hand-me-down cape, goes off into the woods to capture the mythical wolf (the wolf is more of a “boogie man” story, with no one really knowing if it is real or not). She says she is going to her grandmother’s house, who lives on the far end of the woods. But, after many hours, she hasn’t seen nose or tail of the wolf and actually visits her grandmother. Of course, instead she meets the wolf. Now, things change big time. She is eaten whole, no one is coming to save them, and Lu finds herself in the belly of the beast. Literally. Here she meets a motley crew of fairy and folktale individuals, through the adventures within the tummy of the wolf lessons are hopefully learned, and not so spoiler, she will escape. The other part that is different is we are not just seeing Lu’s story, but the village as well. There is a character that will play an important part in how things will turn out in the end.
It is the artwork that sets this story apart from others as Estrada really makes a stomach kinda homey. Okay, it’s dark, damp and smells like fish, but that’s okay. It’s a book and we are readers so we don’t experience smell or cold. But we do experience colors, details and the presentation. It is both slowly paced and reads quickly. There is an offness to my adult reading ears that made me think maybe it was a translation, but at least it did not feel completely “American” (Canadian, French or German, were my first thoughts). Yet, the author is from Colorado and the illustrator from CA. Therefore, for the adult reader you get an experience and the at least aged 10 and up can just enjoy a Girl Power, family story and might get the idea of hybris, greed, selfishness, trying (and failing), vanity and more, which is the lesson we are supposed to learn, in a clever turn of events.
