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    The Wicker King
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    The Wicker King
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    The Wicker King
    Ebook314 pages2 hours

    The Wicker King

    By K. Ancrum

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The Wicker King is a psychological young adult thriller that follows two friends struggling as one spirals into madness.

    Jack once saved August's life…now can August save him?

    August is a misfit with a pyro streak and Jack is a golden boy on the varsity rugby team—but their intense friendship goes way back. Jack begins to see increasingly vivid hallucinations that take the form of an elaborate fantasy kingdom creeping into the edges of the real world. With their parents’ unreliable behavior, August decides to help Jack the way he always has—on his own. He accepts the visions as reality, even when Jack leads them on a quest to fulfill a dark prophecy.

    August and Jack alienate everyone around them as they struggle with their sanity, free falling into the surreal fantasy world that feels made for them. In the end, each one must choose his own truth.

    Written in vivid micro-fiction with a stream-of-consciousness feel and multimedia elements, K. Ancrum's The Wicker King touches on themes of mental health and explores a codependent relationship fraught with tension, madness and love.

    An Imprint Book

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 31, 2017
    ISBN9781250101563
    Author

    K. Ancrum

    K. Ancrum is the author of award-winning thrillers, notably The Wicker King and most recently Lethal Lit: Murder of Crows. K. is a Chicago native passionate about diversity and representation in young adult fiction. She currently writes most of her work in the lush gardens of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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    Reviews for The Wicker King

    4/5

    127 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      That is a beautiful story. The author note made me cry. All the characters deserved way better than the adults in their lifes gave them. This was trully mind blowing. Also, I read it in less than a day, I couldn't put it down.
    • 4/5
      This book is bizarre and that's making it hard for me to shelve it. It takes place in an (albeit far-fetched) version of the "real world" but, due to a specific type of mental illness, there are a lot of fantastical elements.

      August and Jack are lifelong friends but when Jack starts experiencing hallucinations that gradually get worse and more encompassing, August chooses to play along out of a grandiose sense of obligation, instead of thinking that Jack would instead benefit from some actual medical help. August ignoring all the signs that Jack is actually ill finally coalesce to them being sentenced to criminal psych ward separated by order, though while there Jack finally gets the treatment he needed.

      I ended up really enjoying the story because of how weird it is but also really enjoyed August and Jack as characters as well as their own friendship. There were several moments where it seemed a little too far flung from reality but I think that added to the charm of the story as a whole. This book isn't going to be for everyone but it's one that I won't be forgetting soon.
    • 2/5
      Grabbed this one to read in the voting line because I'd thought it would be a good Halloween-y read. Meh, not so much, and not for me. I was hoping for a dose of magical realism, but this is straight-up realistic and, well, a pretty darn awful situation. I know people who like to read this realistic-difficult-life type of genre, but it's just not for me. Even with the excellent, efficient but weighty writing.

      Plotwise, my biggest frustration was that no one thought or suggested that Jack might have a tumor, and that, despite his incredible levels of delusions and pain, it took months for anyone in the hospital to think to do a brain scan. The secondary characters were wonderful, though. I loved August and Jack's circle of friends, all of them caring for each other in their own ways, and the reactions of those who stopped caring as well.

      One thing that particularly interested me about the book was its physical appearance. Not only is it gorgeous on the outside--with beautiful gold images of August's attempts to record Jack's delusions--it also has some ephemera from their lives, like a scrapbook. I didn't quite get why there were CD mixtapes from most characters when only one of them talks about making one, or the article about the farmer who unexpectedly found something interesting in his field, and I wish we'd had more elaborate drawings of Jack's visions. But the progress of the pages from clean and neat through grey smudges until they were finally black with white text was an excellent visual for how bad the situation was getting. I did notice, though that the back matter's regular black-on-white pages gave the impression of a happy/normal ending that just wasn't going to come from a realistic book. Though it did kind of nail home the author's excellent closing note about how adults failing teens is something that happens in the real world.

      Finally, I'm extremely uncomfortable with the two main characters' relationship. It's so unhealthy, and the text is wonderfully aware of that at the beginning, but then at the end August and Jack get together like it's some kind of triumph instead of a total terror. These two codependent people in an abusive relationship are just going to continue, but are we supposed to ship them just because they went through hell together--a hell of mental illness and said abusive relationship? The ending felt more like a tragedy to me than hopeful ending that I think it was going for. Or maybe the fact that the page stayed totally dark at the end is a sign that it is a tragedy, with no real hope in sight.

      So yeah, my rating is no fault of the book's, just my own taste.
    • 4/5
      For some reason, I always thought this book was a fantasy. It made me think of the old movie the Wicker Man (both versions). But that could not be farther away from the plot of this story.This book is a look at two teen boys, August and Jack, as they descend into madness. You know this from the very beginning because as of page five you know one of them is in an asylum. The story takes you through how August got there.At times this story is hard to follow. Each chapter is less than five pages and each has a heading that sometimes makes perfect sense, and other times could lead to debates on it’s meaning. Most of the story is told from August’s point of view, but we see snatches from other friends who want to be helpful, but don’t know how. The adults are useless, either because they are absent, dealing with their own mental difficulties, or not paying attention. August tries to be there, be the grownup for his best friend Jack. But as Jack gets stranger and stranger, he pulls August under with him. Literally in certain parts. The cast of friends see things happening, and try to help, but how can you help when things seem hopeless? This book is also confusing, but I think it is intended to be that way, so the reader gets to feel a bit as the boys do; lost and afloat looking for solid ground. This book is both moving and terrifying in the best way. It is well written, and thought provoking. I will need time to recover from this read. It’s just … wow!There is a novella that tells the story from Jack’s side, available as an ebook. If you get to the end of this, that might be worth reading. That would be the fantasy book I was thinking this was. The idea intrigues me, but right now, I can’t do that. I need a rest. Like the boys, I need to sleep and be left alone with my thoughts. I can see why this book was getting so much praise when it came out four years ago. It deserves every bit of it. And it should be on library shelves for years to come, as there are things teens will see about themselves in the pages, and it may prompt them to get the help they need.This book was fantastic. It was hard, but it was worth reading, and a topic not readily found in many YA books.TW: Non-graphic sex, mental instability
    • 4/5
      I didn't really expect anything that happened in this book. It was an interesting read, but it left me in a really weird mood. 3.5 stars
    • 5/5
      Oh wow, I really don't know what to say here.

      Half of it is because I read this book a month ago, but part of it is because I needed to PROCESS this.

      Because wow, this book is a Lot.

      There are some metaphors going on here, some which I don't think I quite grasp, and the relationship between the two characters is ridiculously complex. I feel so soft for them, and so sorry for them and I want to parse out what it means to depend on someone so badly you don't know who you are without them. Yet, the text presents this as both healthy and unhealthy. At once, it is both good and bad, needed and unnecessary.

      There's a lot, and I don't know what to think of it, but I know it made my chest hurt, and I know I loved these two boys as much as they needed to be love.

      I highly recommend. Because it's the kind of book you have to experience.
    • 4/5
      Perks of Being a Wallflower meets Challenger Deep.
    • 4/5
      An intense YA novel that is a terrific example of how fanfiction trains novelists in a different way than MFA programs - this honestly read more like (really good) fic than anything else. It'll have a niche audience, but that audience will like it very much.
    • 2/5
      "The Wicker King" is receiving very positive reviews on Goodreads and I usually enjoy books dealing with mental illness, but I never connected with this one. I liked the short chapters, it made the novel very easy to read, but I thought the characters were underdeveloped, especially August, the plot confusing and the ending unsatisfying. Not for me!