The rewilding by Donna M. Cameron

The rewilding opens like a thriller with Jagger, a corporate corruption whistleblower, on the run from both the police and his ruthless father’s hitmen. His retreat to the safety of a secret cave remembered from childhood explorations, is disrupted by an encounter with what he at first takes to be a huldra, a wild creature of the forest. But Nia, the feral girl, is real and just as desperate as him, with her own reasons for avoiding the outside world. The two are thrown together, constantly on the alert for danger.

At this point, the novel becomes like an exposition for climate change awareness, but the dying land they move through is not some distant dystopian future but current day Australia with drought, super-storms, megafires, and system collapse. Nia opens Jagger’s eyes to it all. Nia is a committed activist, gutsy and determined. Jagger, in contrast, is a money man, often coming across as an indecisive coward. But in his journey with Nia, he gradually rediscovers the love of nature and good values of his early childhood that his mother tried to instil, values he lost in the consumerist drive of his life in his father’s company.

The climate warnings are not all doom either, along the way the reader finds out about rewilding, sanctuaries, cooking oil for car fuel, ocean cleaning, green buildings, and other positive actions that are taking place across the world.

The rewilding is an unusual mix of genres: thriller, climate treatise, myth, quest, hate-to-love romance; but it absolutely works, and the action holds the reader’s interest until the end. For adult and young adult readers concerned about the environment, it raises awareness but also offers hope.

Themes: Environment, Climate change, Activism, Consumerism, Crime.

Helen Eddy