Hear Her Howl

By: Kim DeRose

Narrated by: Hayden Bishop

As fiercely feminist as it is hopeful, this speculative, sapphic YA romance from the author of For Girls Who Walk through Fire is simultaneously a modern-day war cry and a PSA that there is a wolf who slumbers inside us all—we only have to wake her.

Rue’s life is over. After she’s caught kissing a girl behind the Sunday School classrooms, she gets exiled to Sacred Heart so she can be transformed into her mother’s idea of a respectable lady. The irony of being sent to—of all places—an all-girls Catholic boarding school is not lost on Rue, especially when she falls immediately and irreversibly under the spell of its ethereal, ferocious outcast, Charlotte Savage.

But there’s more to Charlotte than her sharp gaze and even sharper tongue: Charlotte Savage is, against all logic, a werewolf. And Rue can become one, too—any woman can, if she’s brave enough to heed the wild that howls inside of her.

She and Charlotte aren’t alone in answering the call, and upon forming a wolf pack of fearless girls who refuse to remain docile, Rue realizes she couldn’t have been more wrong. Her life isn’t over. It’s just beginning.

This world is not kind to women, much less wild women . . . but God help the man who tries to cage the girls of Sacred Heart.

Critic reviews

Kim DeRose’s books are an essential antidote to the unrelenting repression of teenage girls, and while we can’t give our daughters witchcraft and lycanthropy (more’s the pity), we can give them stories of girls claiming their power and their wildness in a world that wants to stifle them. Hear Her Howl is the sapphic, Catholic-school, werewolf power ballad you didn’t know you needed.—Laini Taylor, New York Times bestselling author

A uniquely feminist twist on the werewolf myth, Hear Her Howl will grip you from its opening lines to its explosive conclusion. Full of wry wit and rooted in a nostalgic 90s setting, this powerful story deftly examines Rue’s struggle to break free of her “good girl” conditioning and tackles the nuances of privilege alongside an empowering story of friendship and sapphic romance.

Like the girls of Sacred Heart Academy, you will leave the pages of DeRose’s work transformed, ready to question the cages that confine your truest self and inspired to form a wild pack of your own.—Isabel Sterling, author of These Witches Don’t Burn

Full of 90s nostalgia yet heartbreakingly relevant, Hear Her Howl is the book I wish I'd had as a teen. It's also a timely reminder that it's never too late to find the wild within. Puts the grrr in grrrl power! —Mara Rutherford, author of A Multitude of Dreams

Juxtaposing wild and tame, sacred and profane, Hear Her Howl is charged with a ferocious desire for freedom, exploring the force of nature that is female friendship while empowering readers to discover the 'sacred holiness' of our authentic selves. If you've ever chafed at the confines of expectations foisted upon you by family, religion, or any other institution, this book is for you.—Madeline Claire Franklin, author of The Wilderness of Girls

Hear Her Howl is both a love song to teenage girls and a rousing cry to freedom for us all. Kim DeRose shines a compassionate but unflinching light on patriarchy, gender roles, and the cages we build around those we love—and ourselves—as a result. It’s a hard world, with trauma and ingrained programming repeating like a fractal across generations, but DeRose reminds us that our inner wolf is always there, always waiting for us. We need only claim her.—Shveta Thakrar, author of the Andre Norton Nebula Award finalist Star Daughter