Into That Forest by Louis Nowra (review)

In the early twentieth century Tasmania, six-year-old Hannah’s life takes a dramatic turn when her family’s boat capsizes on a river during a storm, killing her parents and stranding Hannah and her slightly older friend Becky in the bush. A pair of of Tasmanian tigers adopt the girls as their cubs and provide them with food, shelter, and warmth and the two girls quickly come to think of the animals (dubbed Dave and Corinna by Hannah) as family as they themselves grow increasingly feral. Becky’s father tracks the girls down, using Hannah as bait to catch and kill Dave, and then separates the girls in an attempt to recivilize them. When Becky runs away into the bush after a disastrous school experience, her father turns to Hannah to find her, but the reunion between the two girls ends in tragedy. Nowra doesn’t sugarcoat this survival story at all, and the loss of Hannah’s parents, the girls’ behavioral transformation into predators (complete with bloody repasts), and the tragic deaths of Dave and Becky all carry visceral and emotional weight. Descriptions of the animal skills that Hannah and Becky develop are fascinating, as is the general immersion in the Tasmanian setting. Authorial notes would have been helpful, particularly to indentify the “tigers” as thylacines, large, striped, predatory, dog-like marsupials native only to Tasmania and now extinct. This nonetheless is a gripping exploration of survival, grief, and animal vs. human mindsets; hand it to kids who enjoyed The Life of Pi or to those intrigued by stories of feral children.