(Contains Spoilers for Wild Dark Shore)
I finished Wild Dark Shore recently and can’t stop thinking about the ending—specifically, whether Rowan’s death had to happen.
From a character arc perspective, I don’t think her death was justified. Her arc seemed to focus on: “Can I offer a child motherly love, even after being traumatized from my brother drowning while under my care?” And she had already answered that question as “yes” before she got stuck in that tube of water with Orly.
From a thematic perspective, maybe her death was necessary:
– Themes of climate change killing humans: the tube only filled with water because of the melting permafrost; so maybe she’s meant to be just one more awful death in a list of awful deaths caused by climate change;
– Or, going one step further, it could be related to a theme of “humanity getting what it deserves by suffering because of climate change”—humans killed the Earth, now the Earth kills humans.
What got me the most is how brutally unfair it is to Orly. Now he’s had not only his biological mom die “because of him” (in childbirth) but he’s also had Rowan, this other mother figure, die saving his life. And no matter how many adults explain to him that it wasn’t his fault, this would be so horribly traumatizing for a child. But maybe that’s part of the point? Maybe it connects to the environmental message—if we destroy the Earth, look at how that hurts our children?
Another possibly problematic implication:
That somehow, Rowan still needed to “redeem herself” for her brother’s death—even though it wasn’t her fault, since no child should be left alone supervising other children near water. Why couldn’t she have redeemed herself by staying alive and continuing to love the kids?
If she had stayed alive, I think the book would have felt more like a story about humans finding ways to love and support each other in a time of crisis. But because Rowan died, I think it transformed the book into something that felt tragically unfair, possibly with the message “love definitely does not conquer all and life is fragile.”
What do you think? Did Rowan need to die?
by balladrael
1 Comment
For a book that is largely trauma porn, where a new trauma is introduced every 20 pages or so, it seemed pretty inevitable to me that people were going to die at the end. Actually I was surprised it wasn’t more people.