Leni Zumas’s novel Wolf Bells publishes in September 2025 in the United States, and, honestly, with the current socio-political dysfunction rampaging across the US, it is a novel that could arrive at a more appropriate time. Why? With the signing of Trump’s "Big, Beautiful Bill" into law on 4 July 2025, caretakers across the United States will face increased work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP benefits. The bill also reduces accessibility to essential supports and significantly cuts home-and-community-based services. Thus, an important question arises: when the government cuts essential, life-affirming, and life-saving services and benefits to citizens, whose role is it to provide them? Essentially, Wolf Bells—with its portrayal of an intergenerational community led by a former punk singer—attempts to answer this question. However, the novel also dares to explore the consequences of what happens when a community’s good intentions go completely awry.
On a bluff above a river rises the House, a place where the elderly, the disabled, the abandoned, and the young live alongside one another and complete daily tasks and chores in order to receive free rent. Caz, a former punk singer, is the caretaker for the House’s inhabitants. The House teeters on financial ruin’s edge, and to worsen Caz’s predicaments, two kids—Nola and her little cousin James—show up, needing refuge. James is a special-needs child whose behaviour taxes everyone, but a mystery also looms as to why Nola chose to take James and venture towards the House. As each of the characters wrestles with their own strange, often heartbreaking circumstances—ranging from an elderly man whose daughter has seemingly abandoned him to a woman whose memories of the Holocaust haunt her daily—they must also band together to care for James in whatever ways they can. Meanwhile, the authorities are searching for Nola and James, and those in the House’s surrounding area who know Nola and James’s whereabouts threaten to wreck the House’s goals and innerworkings.
Wolf Bells is raw and gritty and real—a bit like a new, contemporary version of Lord of the Flies. Or, perhaps, it can also be compared to that single scene in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows in which each of the Collins family members are seated miserably around a gigantic table, throwing coarse verbal jabs at one another while Donovan’s "Season of the Witch" plays in the background. The House and its residents are isolated from the outer world’s laws, trappings, and expectations. The House and its residents abide by one set of rules, and, despite their seemingly disrespectful take on another, they do interact and secretly care about one another. Discreetly, Wolf Bells addresses the individual sacrifices, as well as the necessary theoretical, practical and serious changes in societal and cultural mindsets intergenerational living requires. As the housing crisis intensifies, and as medical and long-term care costs skyrocket not only in America, but globally, more and more families and individuals consciously choose intergenerational living. Wolf Bells addresses this issue, since each and every character must make individual sacrifices for the betterment of the House’s residents. Communal bathrooms and living spaces strip away the guise of private ownership and entitlement. Each resident recognizes that spaces like one known as The Fish Bowl are meant for communal interaction, and such spaces eradicate the notion of private ownership. Thus, each character develops a deeper sense of responsibility for maintaining and cleaning these shared spaces.
Of course, one cannot read Wolf Bells without recognizing the disruption Nola and James’s presence causes for the House’s occupants. Wolf Bells portrays Nola as a sensible, precocious youngster who is wise beyond her years because of the neglect she has endured and navigated. She feels a responsibility to and duty for James and knows and perceives his needs better than most adults. However, no matter how much the House’s adults attempt to band together to care for—and even simply tolerate—the children’s presence, lapses in care develop. At first, it is humorous that James toddles around, eating the leaves of one of the plants in the House. Closer to the novel’s end, one of the characters recognizes that James should not be eating the leaves and that Caz does not even know whether or not the plants are edible or poisonous. In this scene, it becomes evident that the House is not truly intergenerational, since the needs of a toddler have never been considered. Also, James’s special needs pose an even larger challenge for the residents of the House, drawing even more into question the House’s inclusivity. James’s needs should be woven into the daily life of the House’s residents, since his needs are a clear reminder of the residents’ interdependence one another.
For one character, the mysterious Marika, James's personality and his behaviour remind Marika of her brother, Theo, whom German soldiers killed because he was disabled. Of all of Wolf Bells’ characters, Marika displays the most empathy for and connection with James. Nevertheless, Marika possesses an otherness entirely her own, one that also sets her apart from the other characters in Wolf Bells. She is Greek, and she is Jewish, and at one point she reflects: "'And then when I came to this country, I learned that Greek in America, meant 'alien' and 'unintelligible.' To be Greek and Jewish was much worse. Refugees of the war America won were not welcome in America because we were spies and Communists, we would steal jobs from citizens, we would spread contagion.'" Therefore, while James becomes the novel’s great educator, so to speak, he and Marika serve as strange, intergenerational mirrors of one another bound together by their otherness and united by a place that fails to understand them.
Part of Wolf Bells’ allure lies in that it is implicitly political and socially aware without being polemical and trite. Wolf Bells is as radical as the society-shifting housing practices it explores—one completely unflinching in its boldness and bravery.
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