The story opens up with a woman, named Lucy Delamar, wanting to adopt a young girl. She adopts young Margaret, a girl who’d been abandoned in a carriage years before and brought there. Margaret is at first excited to start her life with her new found mother but she soon finds herself caged in her adoptive mother’s home. Lucy cages her in, stating that the outside world is full of “wolves.” Margaret begrudgingly accepts this caging and puts up with it for the next eight years. The main conflict here is, when Margaret is fifteen, she yearns for escape from her small cage, avoiding her captor whenever she can, but she is rarely allowed to leave the house (save for school). Her chance at the escape comes from a boy she meets named Marcus, but when she is finally able to leave she see that her mother was right about the wolves that exist in the real world. By the end, Margaret’s views of the world seemed to have become similar to her mother’s after witnessing the violent scene between Marcus and some girl.
I thought the story was told pretty well and I really liked how her mother’s concept of the wolves kept popping up even until the end. Lucy’s paranoia (especially her distrust of the Germans) fit the time period too. I also liked the difference in Margaret and Marcus’s dialogue. Margaret seems to speak in a more refined way compared to Marcus, the normal kid from the outside world.
One thing that caught my eye was an inconsistency with Margaret’s name. A couple of times she is referred to as Marguerite, which I was unsure if maybe that was a full name or just a mistake as it is in there a couple of times. Also, the girl being found abandoned is a bit cliché. You could say that Margaret had become an orphan due to the war. Cliché as well I know but it does fit the time period.
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