Wednesday: A Novelisation of Series One by Tehlor Kay Mejia and the Wednesday TV Show Writers

Wednesday is Pinocchio.

Or, if you want, Wednesday Addams, in Tehlor Kay Mehia's excellent novelisation of Netflix's first series, reinstantiates that eternal hero (in the Joseph Campbell sense) best known in the guise of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio. With the light hand of a master of their craft, Mejia pulls out the plot points charting Wednesday's journey from a wooden caricature of herself to a Real Girl.

Mejia was not handed an easy job. The series, starring (in case you didn't know) Jenna Ortega as the title character, is narrated by Wednesday's inner monologue while also featuring scenes she doesn't witness, which prime viewers for plot developments Wednesday doesn't expect. Tim Burton stitches these threads together onscreen to make an organic whole, but the method wouldn't have survived migrating to the written form. So Mejia has chosen Wednesday's voice to narrate her whole journey and has had to let her incorporate developments she is unaware of into her imaginarium, presented to us in the text, when they unfold into her orbit. The end product is a seamless garment that stands on its own as a rattling good adventure, whether the reader has seen the series or not.

Thus, we follow Wednesday's journey from a monochrome creature fresh from one of Charles Addams' original comic strips, through the gauntlet of life's slings and arrows (sometimes literally) which form the pallet from which one paints one's inner life with all the colours of human experience.

Hence Wednesday as Pinocchio: and given her family, it's not difficult to imagine her as assembled rather than born. She is carted off to a place, Nevermore school, where she doesn't follow her Italian forebear in turning into an ass, true, but the reader learns early on that just about any other transmogrification is possible. Furthermore, the mausoleum of genocidal puritan Joseph Crackstone is as sinister and productive as any leviathan's belly.

Genocide is a depressingly common sanction against that community that has been hounded, hung, drowned and burnt through all of human history: the community of the outcast. Nevermore is a school for Outcasts (note the capital), but Mejia ensures that the social commentary around exclusion, inclusion and intersectionality is always at the service of plot, and like the show's writers doesn't shrink from showing exclusion, particularly, as existing on both sides of the school wall. These issues never distract from the plot, and therefore push the story all the more powerfully towards its powerful and emotional denouement. By this time, Wednesday seems to us a little less glacial but, crucially, Mejia never yields to the temptation of the tired Ice Queen Melting trope. Wednesday's gelid core has not been passively warmed by an outside source; rather, her harrowing life experiences at Nevermore allow her heart to kindle the flame of humanity through its own growth.

I finished Wednesday energised and invested, and can only hope that Tehlor Kay Mejia is handed the job of novelising the second series.