Wolf Hollow

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 9

Chapters 10-18

Chapters 19-27

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Barn

The McBride family’s barn is a frequent motif throughout the novel and functions as a symbol of protection and refuge. Even before Annabelle hides Toby there, the barn is where members of the McBride family can go to be alone. It is where John naps after farm work, where kittens and hatchlings begin their lives, and where Annabelle longs to escape “with a book and an apple” (1). The barn’s numerous stalls and storerooms are nurturing spaces where tender forms of life, like “fresh and soft kittens” or people at their most vulnerable can heal and thrive (112). Although Annabelle would like to treat herself as one of the vulnerable and hide in the barn too, she knows that her responsibility is to be out in the world and toil for good.

Instead, Toby who has been out wandering in the world, should have the barn’s protection. There, in the safe space of the storerooms, he recovers enough to trust Annabelle and to tell her about what happened to him. However, he is aware that hiding in the McBride’s barn is not a permanent solution, and he too will have to emerge and face the full force of society’s hatred towards him. After this incident, Annabelle takes less refuge in the barn than outdoors in nature, where open spaces like Turtle Stone prove more comforting. This outdoor site, which has witnessed the history of generations, provides solace because it allows her to realize how small she is in the grand scheme of the universe.

Wolf Hollow

Wolf Hollow, the title of Wolk’s book, is a consistent motif in the novel. At the beginning, Annabelle learns that Wolf Hollow is a place where people used to dig deep pits for catching wolves because “they were getting too brave and too many” (11). The Hollow was thus a symbol of agrarian man’s victory over nature. On a metaphorical level, the trapping of wolves at Wolf Hollow parallels the agrarian community’s attempt to contain and annihilate wandering Toby when his strangeness makes him the scapegoat for their fears.

Indeed, at the end of the novel, Toby is buried at Wolf Hollow, associating the man and the Hollow in Annabelle’s mind. As she goes to Toby’s gravestone to tell him about her life, she has the sensation that “the hollow seemed to listen, too” (290). Both Toby and the Hollow have seen traumatic events, and as Annabelle considers that Toby was “so torn between the need to fight and the urge to live,” she cannot “help but think of the hollow as a dark place, no matter how bright its canopy, no matter how pretty the flowers that grew in its capricious light” (290). Arguably, Annabelle’s bleak view of the Hollow stems from the fact that she has grown up and seen the ugliness in a place she previously considered as harmonious. The pretty flowers are only a superficial foil for centuries of darkness, violence, and strife.

The Wanderer

The wanderer is a crucial motif in Wolk’s novel. Unlike the settled farmers who populate the landscape of the novel and are engaged in quantifiable daily work on their land, the wanderer roams according to his own whim and necessity. For Annabelle, who grew up during the Depression, vagabonds became part of her landscape, as she notices how “there were people […] cut loose from their roots […] who had taken up wandering and didn’t know how to stop” (21). Shell-shocked Toby is a variation on the wanderer, because although he does not settle anywhere, “he circled the hills endlessly” (22). The circular pattern befitted the trapped, repetitive loop of his thoughts. People do “not know what to make of” Toby and his behavior, and though they are unsettled by him, they cannot assume that he is necessarily malign (23).

However, this unsettled man is assigned malignity when Betty, a girl who belongs in school and on her grandparents’ farm, goes missing from those places, and he is also absent. They assume the worst, imagining that this shamed displaced man has also dragged Betty into the ranks of the shameful and displaced. The other men in the community are forced to become wanderers themselves, as they seek out where a misplaced Betty and Toby could have gone to. As the hunt intensifies, Toby is unable to accept the McBrides’ offer of refuge in the barn, and he forces himself to wander once more. Toby is so unused to being a settled member of a community that when he gets afraid, he decides to go back to the wandering he knows. When Toby dies, Annabelle’s mother explains his wandering as a state of uncertainty, regarding whether he wants to live in this world anymore. He thus consigns himself to life on the run until the authorities catch up with him.