Before I talk about this book at all, I want to first say that I have not read the first book in the series, so I had to do a little mental catching up before I was able to get into the story as a whole.  Luckily, however, the world de Lint has created with his Wildlings series is so cool that it wasn’t long before I was going along for the ride being revealed to me.

The story is told in a rather unique way, too.  Each chapter uses first person narrative, but cycles through the perspectives of three different characters – Chaingang, Josh and Marina.  Each of them is a fairly typical teenager, but with one distinct difference – they are Wildlings.  One day in the small coastal town where they all live, a bunch of kids suddenly discovered that they could shape shift into various animals.  Over time, they learned to control their shifts back and forth between animal and human, and some (like our narrators) have even managed to keep their abilities more or less secret from the general public.

Over My Head picks up after things have settled down somewhat in town, but for kids trying to find a balance between their two lives, events become overwhelming quickly, and each of them ends up needing to figure out who they can trust.  And who they can’t.

From police, FBI, gangs, other students at school, their own families, and various factions within the underground Wildling community, Josh, Marina and Chaingang have to sort through what’s real and what’s not to get to the truth, all while shouldering all of the responsibilities that come with secret identities and super powers by themselves.

I loved that, not only does each character have a distinct voice throughout the novel, but they are also not all generic, middle class white kids like I was picturing in my mind when I first picked up the book.  They may all have slightly different cultural references from what I am used to, but their problems really are universal.  They just have refreshingly different faces with which to tell their stories.

Over My Head is published by Penguin Canada and can be found wherever books are sold.