By Clare B. Dunkle. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.
Readers have written me to ask questions about the book. Here are some of those questions and their answers. Although I still answer reader mail about this book, I no longer add questions and answers to this page because I wrote this book over five years ago, and I no longer trust my memory about its details.
WARNING: If you have not read the book, please DO NOT read this page. The questions won't interest you, and they will ruin some of the book's best surprises.
I WAS WONDERING ABOUT THE REFERENCE TO FIONN MCCUMHAIL
AND NA FIANNA. I WAS TAUGHT ABOUT HIS EXPLOITS IN SCHOOL AND WAS TOLD
IT WAS AN IRISH MYTH. IS THE STORY ALSO WELL KNOWN IN SCOTLAND OR
IS IT A PART OF CELTIC MYTHOLOGY RATHER THAN IRISH?
WHAT DOES CARVER MEAN WHEN HE SAYS "MAYBE
NOT ON LAND" TO MADDIE'S TELLING HIM THERE AREN'T
ANY OTHER GODS?
NED'S WEREWOLF SON, DID HE PASS THE WEREWOLF
TO PAUL OR IS IT STILL IN HIM WHEN HE GETS BURNED?
DO MADDIE AND PAUL AND FATHER MAC KEEP THE WHOLE
ORDEAL A SECRET FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES, EVEN FROM MADDIE'S
PARENTS?
DID PAUL AND MADDIE GET MARRIED?
HOW
OLD ARE PAUL AND MADDIE IN THE BOOK?
IF PAUL COULD CARVE A DUPLICATE OF THE KEY TO FREE
LADY MARY, WHY WOULDN'T HE HAVE DONE THAT SAME THING TO FREE
NED EARLIER?
WHY DOES MADDIE WISH SHE HADN'T LEARNED
ABOUT PAUL'S ILLNESS? IF I LEARNED SOMETHING LIKE THAT, I
WOULD BE EXCITED ABOUT IT.
WHY DOES PAUL CARVE A PORTRAIT OF MADDIE AS
A TREE? THAT SEEMS LIKE A WEIRD THING TO DO.
DOES THE PERSON ALWAYS SURVIVE THE WEREWOLF
CURE LIKE MADDIE DID? OR WAS IT BECAUSE THE ANGEL WAS THERE TO FIGHT
WITH HER?
WHERE DID YOU GET THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK?
WHAT AGE IS THIS BOOK FOR?
DID PAUL'S
CHILDREN HAVE WEREWOLF PROBLEMS?
ARE
YOU WRITING A SEQUEL TO THIS BOOK?
WHY ISN'T THERE A DELETED SCENES PAGE FOR
THIS BOOK?
Many people don't realize that the Highlanders largely share the culture of Ireland rather than the culture of the rest of Scotland—they share the Gaelic culture, that is. There's a sharp cultural divide at the Highland hills, and the Scottish king never could do much about it. Gaelic culture used to be united and not separated by the Irish Sea because it was such an easy pathway before the Norse came along and messed everything up with their raiding. Boats were the way to get around in the days before the Vikings: it was much easier to travel by sea than to take land routes in the Highlands, where wheeled carts weren't used until the 1800's because there was just no point to them (roll them somewhere flat, and they'd stick in a bog; roll them up a hill, and they couldn't take the rocks). So Ireland and the Highlands (with its many island clans) were very closely allied, and those alliances remained for centuries.
This means that Finn and his Fianna were beloved heroes celebrated in Highland stories and in place names all over Highland Scotland, as well as in Ireland. Even the Lowland Scots in the Middle Ages told stories about Finn.
Paul's family on the Isle of Mull is descended from Viking (Norse) stock. Consequently, even though he lived in a "Christian" community, his religion wasn't Christian. His relatives still held the Viking beliefs about the gods of land and of sea. Their living was closely tied to the sea, so they were superstitious about angering the sea gods, and they were afraid of priests, who could turn those gods against them. Even the modern-day fishermen in Great Britain were extremely superstitious, with long lists of taboos that could ruin the fishing or cause dangerous accidents.
Maddie, on the other hand, is old-stock Gaelic Catholic, and her Christian beliefs go down to her bones. But besides humans, angels, and demons, Gaelic Catholics believed in the existence of lots of "other" creatures, like the water horse, the banshee, and the Fair Folk.
Like the spiritual parasite that it is, the werewolf has jumped from victim to victim as it has worn out the strength of its old hosts, and it went via the bite from Ned's son to Paul.
Yes, they do. If the villagers knew Paul was once a werewolf, they'd still be suspicious of him and turn on him if crops failed or disease struck. So when Father Mac baptizes Paul and helps him to "put on the new man," he forgets that the old Paul ever existed.
This book used to have a different ending that took place in modern-day America. I liked ending the book in the States because so many Highlanders were forced to come here during the clearances in the 1800's, but we took it out because it was too distracting.
In that ending, a little boy and his grandmother are in church, lighting a candle before a wooden statue of the Madonna, and she's telling him about his ancestor who carved it. She tells him that the Madonna looks just like that ancestor's wife—in fact, when soldiers came around during the Reformation to destroy all the religious statues, the woodcarver's granddaughter claimed it was a family portrait and saved it. So you can see from that snippet that Paul and Maddie did get married and had a family, and that he carved his Madonna statue to look just like her.
Paul is seventeen, and Maddie is fifteen.
Paul didn't carve a duplicate of the key earlier because a wooden key by itself couldn't have freed Ned. It could only serve as a model for a blacksmith to use in making a metal key, and that's what happens to free Lady Mary. The locks of that day were simpler than ours: the shapes on the key's shaft had to pass through various spaces in the lock's guards, but they didn't have to fit exactly. Our keys have a much tighter pressure-fit mechanism, or even a magnetic code, so Paul's model wouldn't be precise enough to work nowadays.
Paul's disease is a ghastly one; it's like prying a cancer diagnosis out of someone and then knowing that you can't really help. And the sad fact is that Maddie isn't like us anyway. She's not a modern girl. Maddie has no doubt that magic is real: she's believed in angels, devils, witches and monsters since she was tiny, along with everyone else in her town. That means this secret doesn't unlock any exciting doors for her. What it does do is threaten her horizons. Maddie is content with her home, her customs, and her beliefs. She's used to being part of a group—part of the clan—and knowing only what everyone else knows. Now she knows a secret she can't share with the other members of her clan, and she's not comfortable breaking off on her own.
Paul's carving of Maddie is indeed a little weird, as you point out. It's not warm-and-fuzzy romantic. Maddie doesn't care for it any more than you would; she is down-to-earth and has a very different view of herself than Paul has of her. Carvings, in her mind, are for saints and heroes, not for regular people. But to Paul, she is a hero/saint, and that's exactly why he carves her.
Paul has spent years communicating his feelings through his carvings; shut out of society, he hasn't been able to talk with anyone about what he thinks of the world. (Ned, the only person in on his secret, isn't a good confidant.) So when he carves Maddie into his tree, he doesn't do it to impress her. He's doing it for himself. As an artist, he finds his inspiration in his own thoughts and feelings, and when he falls in love, he carves his love for the world to see. That's all there is to it.
The choice of a tree may seem strange to us, but it wouldn't seem strange if we were Gaelic. Highlanders had lots of poetry comparing people to trees; the tree was a powerful image to them of a person's character and goodness. In fact, if you go to this website, you'll see that that Highlanders are still finding inspiration in this idea.
I honestly wonder myself whether or not the cure would always end so happily. In Maddie's case, Paul had accepted the idea that he should die to save her life, so he was ready to fight to save her. But that makes this an unusual cure. How often are both people willing to give up their own lives for each other? Ned's son, for instance, lived for decades, knowing the danger he posed to his own father. He didn't decide to kill himself to spare his father this risk. If Ned had ever tried the cure, would his son have fought to save his father's life? Probably not. Ned would have been killed. Sometimes the price to break a curse is very high.
My personal feeling is that angels are always there to fight with us when we're doing something good. We may not be able to see them, but sometimes we feel their help.
I read the third Harry Potter book (Prisoner of Azkaban) and felt very sorry for poor Professor Lupin. That made me wonder about werewolves and do research on werewolf folklore. In the folktales, werewolf stories are always sad. I wondered if anything be done to save a werewolf from its awful condition. I knew a cure would have to be very hard, or folklore wouldn't have any werewolves at all. Playing around with folklore ideas, I thought up the end of the book, and the scene where Maddie confronts the werewolf was the very first thing I thought of. Once I had these two people before my mind's eye, both of them in horrible danger, I wondered who they were and what might have gotten them to this point. Then I made up the rest of the book to go with them.
This book is for ages 12 and up, just like the trilogy books. It's intended to be creepy and scary, though, and it's much darker in parts than they are. It's designed to be an anti-horror book that can still appeal to the horror crowd, so there are some bad moments along the way, but I'm not the kind of reader who enjoys a book with blood spattered across every page, so the horror in this book comes more from creepy shocks, like a ghost story. The ten-year-olds in our library's target reader group thought it was scary but didn't mind it, but the only nine-year-old reader stopped partway through and slept with her mom for two nights because it was too scary for her. But everyone has a different tolerance for scary stories.
No. The werewolf spirit in my story transfers itself to a new victim via a bite. It doesn't get passed down in a family.
No, there won't be a sequel. These characters have gone through enough trouble, and a new book would bring more trouble into their lives. They deserve a little peace and quiet.
I just didn't write any extra scenes for this book. As I write more novels, I seem to be learning which scenes to write down and which scenes to study in my own head as background material to the story.