For a person in their mid-teens, life should be bursting with possibility. It shouldn’t be concerned with death. Losing a best friend can be devastating. When that friend has taken their own life, the loss can be life-shattering.
To write about it, prose can often seem inadequate. Negri has chosen to write a verse novel. This can be challenging but Negri’s writing is assured and the rewards are great.
Two young girls meet, and bond immediately. They’re cast together in a school production of Little Red Riding Hood – one as the Wolf and our narrator as Red. The girls become inseparable (‘There they go / like binary stars, / forming their own constellation’) … until Wolf takes her life without warning. Red is 15 and returns to school six months after Wolf’s death. Red only seems interested in Art, but her old teacher, Val, is absent. Red spends most of her time hiding in one of the music rooms where she hears another student playing piano. A tentative friendship begins between Red and Music Girl, but Red warns her that she cannot be a good friend. Music Girl is patient and persistent. Red draws the attention of Popular Boy, signalling her sexual awakening, with all its associated good and bad.
Sometimes achingly sad, and occasionally surprisingly funny, Negri doesn’t shy away from the difficulty of examining life after someone else’s death: how could someone miss the signs that their friend was contemplating suicide? The Belly Of A Wolf is an emotion-charged, beautifully written novel.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julianne Negri is an award-winning writer and library worker living on Wurundjeri land.
Julianne’s debut children’s novel The Secret Library of Hummingbird House was published in 2020 by Affirm Press and was a 2021 CBCA Notable. Her debut picture book Almost a Fish, illustrated by Evie Barrow, was released in May 2024 and won the Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year. Adding to the variety of publications, Julianne’s debut YA novel The Belly of a Wolf will be published by UWA in March 2026.
Julianne has been the recipient of various awards including the Australian Society of Author’s Emerging Writer’s Mentorship Award, runners up in the Scarlet Stiletto Short Story Award and Highly Commended in the Southern Cross Short Story Award and New England Thunderbolt Prize for Crime.
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