She comes home from the bar at one in the morning with a container of leftovers, climbs the stairs, and finds her twin sitting in a chair by the window with the light on and her eyes open. She says her sister’s name. Nothing. She says it louder, turns the chair, takes her by the shoulders and shakes her, and eventually the eyes focus and her sister says, mildly, what happened this time. It has happened before. Every specialist they have paid for says she is perfectly healthy, and there is a folder of bills to prove it. Big Bad Wolf by Laurie Gilmore opens the Maple Hollow series with a werewolf standing in a bar doorway, and it is being sold on him, but the engine underneath is two sisters and a year of unexplained illness that neither of them can name.
The Sister Who Is Not Allowed to Be Ill
Ruby and Lena Bellerose were orphaned at eight and raised by a great-aunt who has since died, leaving them a cottage, a small trust and each other.
Lena’s episodes began about a year ago. She loses time. She speaks, but not in any language anyone recognises, and when she surfaces she remembers nothing. And she lost her job at the preschool when her assistant found her unresponsive on the alphabet carpet. The town has since improved the story into something about speaking in tongues in front of children, which is how small towns handle things they find frightening.
Ruby works doubles. Ruby brings home leftovers. And Ruby has a plan called don’t stress Lena out and enforces it unilaterally, which by the middle of the book means lying to her sister about almost everything of consequence.
A reading group will recognise this arrangement immediately, and Big Bad Wolf by Laurie Gilmore is unusually precise about the specific loneliness sitting on both sides of it.
What Big Bad Wolf Does With Being Cared For
The confrontation arrives late and it is the best writing in the book.
Lena, finally told the truth, does not thank her sister for the protection. She says that she is not a child. She says she has been kept in the dark about people who were physically hunting her. And then she lands the line the whole novel has been building toward: that Ruby has been treating her like she is broken. She turns Ruby’s own kindnesses into an inventory. Why don’t you go lie down. Why don’t you go rest. And why don’t you shut yourself in your room forever.
Ruby’s answer is not a defence. It is that she was frightened. Lena says she was too.
Nothing is resolved. There is no apology and no reconciliation scene, and the sisters spend the rest of the book slightly estranged while continuing to love each other. That refusal is the most grown-up decision Big Bad Wolf by Laurie Gilmore makes, and it is worth an hour of any group’s time.
A Town That Claims You Whether You Like It or Not
The second thread is quieter and runs the length of the novel.
Ruby has lived in Maple Hollow, up in Aroostook County, since she was eight, and the locals still call her “from away.” She has spent twenty years believing she is tolerated rather than wanted, and the novel lets her be wrong about that in slow instalments: the boss who puts a man’s photograph on the wall of shame for her, the diner owner who has been saying call me if you need anything for years and finally gets taken up on it, three men in their seventies quietly offering to go and deal with somebody.
By the last quarter Ruby has understood that she has a community she never claimed. It is the most emotionally satisfying arc in Big Bad Wolf by Laurie Gilmore, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the romance.
Where Big Bad Wolf Loses the Thread
Not everything is handled with that much care.
The hero’s self-loathing runs on a loop. He decides to leave and then does not, repeatedly, and the pattern outlasts its usefulness.
The supernatural politics turn up late. A rival pack, a land purchase, an inter-pack merger: all introduced in the final stretch, none of it settled.
Lena spends too long as a problem rather than a person. The book knows this, but only says so near the end.
Nothing closes. The last page is not a resolution, and the sequel is not out until October.
A group should know all of this going in, because Big Bad Wolf by Laurie Gilmore is one of those novels that gets better the further it moves from its own plot. The scenes worth discussing are almost all domestic ones: a kitchen table, a hospital bill, a locked bedroom door.
Questions Worth Bringing to Big Bad Wolf
Start with the obvious one, because it is genuinely difficult: was Ruby right? She withheld information that put her sister in danger, and she did it out of love, and her sister was in no state to hear it. Ask the group where the line sits between shielding someone and managing them, and whether anyone at the table has been on the receiving end.
The better question is about the diagnosis. For a year, Lena is told by every doctor that there is nothing wrong with her, which is presented as reassurance and lands as dismissal. The novel eventually supplies a supernatural explanation, but ask the group to sit with the year before that, and with how familiar it sounds to anyone who has been told their symptoms are not showing up on the tests.
There is a third, if the group has the appetite. The romance in Big Bad Wolf by Laurie Gilmore runs on the idea of a bond neither party chose. Ask whether that is romantic or alarming, and whether it would read differently if the woman were the one who could not walk away.
Groups that want a companion should start with The Christmas Tree Farm, which shows what this author does with the same small-town warmth and none of the teeth. How to Help a Hungry Werewolf by Charlotte Stein takes the same premise somewhere funnier and stranger. The Bookstore Sisters by Alice Hoffman is a short, sharp study of two sisters and an inheritance. And Colt by Jessica Peterson is the pure small-town romance, for anyone who wants the town without the woods.
Where It Leaves You
There is a red cloak in this book that belonged to a great-aunt, hanging on a hook by the back door of a cottage where two orphaned girls grew up. Ruby starts wearing it in the last third, every day, because it still smells of sage and rosemary and because everything else has come apart.
That is the object Big Bad Wolf by Laurie Gilmore leaves a group holding. Not the fangs and not the bite. A dead woman’s coat, kept by a granddaughter she raised, worn by a woman walking out into the dark to fetch back somebody she loves. The fairy tale is the costume. The book underneath is about who does the fetching, and what it costs them to keep doing it alone.