This book starts off spooky: Lucy hears strange noises in the walls, a kind of “clawing and gnawing, nibbling and squabbling.”

She tries to persuade her family. Her mother tells her it’s just old house noises. Her brother declares, “Bats!” You think it’s bats? Lucy asks, setting herself up for a little brother’s typical rejoinder: “No. I think you are!” And then he goes on to assure her that a) wolves don’t live around there; and b) wolves don’t live in walls. “Perhaps the noises you heard come from rats,” her father tells her (as if that makes it better).

But the more Lucy thinks about the sounds, the more she becomes convinced. Only her tiny stuffed pig-puppet tries to assure her. Until one night…

“…the wolves came out of the walls.”

The family flees, huddling at the far end of the garden, imagining the wolves watching their TV and eating their food and dancing up and down the stairs. The weigh their options: move to Antarctica or the Sahara Desert or Outer Space. And then Lucy realizes that, in her hurry to flee, she left her pig-puppet behind.

The only thing worse than being afraid yourself is being afraid for someone else.

So Lucy sneaks back to the house and into the walls, creeping past a big snoring wolf to grab her pig puppet – and then “quiet as a shadow” she dives back into the walls and creeps back to the garden.

Day 2: The family is still weighing options: desert islands, hot-air balloons, a tree-house. “Or we could go back and live in our house again,” Lucy suggests. What about the wolves? Her family demands. “They’re in the house, not the walls,” Lucy points out.

And so the family sneaks back into the walls of their house – only to find the wolves yukking it up at a party, eating mother’s homemade jam from the jar, playing father’s second-best tuba, and beating all of her brother’s high scores on his video game (oh no!).

“Right. I’ve had enough.” And with that, young Lucy leads her family out of the walls, and the chase the wolves out of their house. (“Flee! Flee! Flee!” the wolves cry.)

The family cleans up and the house goes back to normal, until one night…

…Lucy hears a “noise that sounded exactly like an elephant trying not to sneeze.”

Oh gosh, I love this book. I love the storytelling, I love the perfectly paired illustrations, I love the message:

Sometimes dreading something bad is worse than the bad thing itself. And if you just take courage and confront it, it will run away, crying, Flee! Flee! Flee!

I discovered this book when the children in my life were very small. I wanted to buy it for them but I was a little worried that it would scare them at first, give them nightmares or something. I didn’t want to be the aunt that gave a book that was so scary that it caused problems for their parents.

I can’t remember who I finally broke down and bought a copy for first – it could have been Maliya or Maria, perhaps Sierra, or Deighton, or – or perhaps it was Lucy. Whoever it was, she loved it. It was scary but in a safe way and the courageous little Lucy, not afraid to confront the thing that worries everyone else set a good model. They loved it and wanted to hear it again and again and again. And I was happy to oblige.

There is just one thing I need to say. It’s what everyone says about wolves (and what everyone tells Lucy in this book)…

“If the wolves come out of the walls it’s all over.“