Description
When your dad's a fugitive, who do you trust - him, or yourself?
Twelve-year-old Olive Silver knows how to check every room with a knife when she gets home from school, how to survive alone and how to keep secrets. She's had to - ever since her criminal dad abandoned her family five years ago and let them pay for his crime.
But now, he's back.
The day she spots him outside her school, everything tilts. Olive calls her big brother Ben, who's two days from graduating the police academy, and follows Dad through rain and darkness, across railway tracks and through wrecking yards, desperate for answers. Does Dad love her? Or is he only back for the money?
As the night spins out of control, Olive faces a choice- let Dad go, or hunt him down and bring him to justice.
Raised by Wolves is a tense, heart-stopping thriller about loyalty, betrayal and finding out who you really are when the people you trust most let you down.
Review
This is a terrific follow up to Tristan Bancks’s hugely popular Two Wolves, published in 2014.
Set five years after Two Wolves and seen through the eyes of the now 12-year-old Olive. It turns out that the money that her dad stole has been hidden in the roof of their rental home by her mum, who has only ever used it in small amounts for emergencies. Her older brother Ben is about to graduate from the police academy, and then suddenly in walks her dad.
Olive knows that she shouldn’t even talk to him, but she still has that big question - does he even love her? When she sees him and offers to “lend” him $10,000 to get him out of a gambling debt, Olive wonders what harm it could do? But it turns out everything, and Olive can’t allow him to take the money without any consequences...
When Olive rings Ben, together they set about putting things right. It is an extremely dangerous criminal world that they get themselves into, but they have no choice. Can they succeed?
Full of themes of doing the right thing, betrayal, family, as well as family history and displacement, crime and punishment, this is a typically enthralling Tristan Bancks middle grade thriller. I believe that the content best lends itself to readers in the lower secondary years, but there is nothing that makes it unsuitable for mature primary school readers.
