A review by kimabill
The Nest by Kenneth Oppel

2.0

Audrey got this book at school and the whole time she was reading it, she kept telling me how the plot was so weird and she didn't even know how to describe it. When she finished reading it, she left it on my pillow one night, so then I read it too. She was right, the plot is super wacky. There is a kid named Steve who has a little baby brother named Theo who has a bunch of medical problems and his parents are very preoccupied with taking Theo for lots of tests at the hospital. One day Steve gets stung by a wasp and has an allergic reaction. He discovers a wasp nest being built outside of his house and starts having dreams that he is talking to the queen wasp. The queen wasp tells him that she is going to help his baby brother by replacing him with a new healthy baby and Steve just has to open the window when the new baby is ready. At first, Steve dismisses this as just a dream. But then the dream wasp knows all sorts of things she shouldn't know - things that haven't happened yet, and Steve isn't sure it's really a dream. There is also a strange knife sharpener guy who keeps roaming the neighborhood looking for work who becomes integral to this wasp queen/new baby story in a very weird way. (Re-read THAT sentence and try to make sense of it all)

The resolution to the story is very wackadoo and I wasn't entirely sure what the author was trying to do. At first the book kind of reminded me of A Monster Calls and I thought it was going to be an allegory about grief and childhood and whatever. But it didn't really turn out that way and I just felt a little lost as to what it was all supposed to mean. Oh well. It was fun to talk about it with Audrey.

**Other random thought - the kid really did not seem like a "Steve." The name was all wrong.