The Nest

The Nest by Kenneth Oppel is a story about a young boy, Steve, and his family. His new baby brother has just come home from the hospital, and Steve can tell that he is sick. His parents are constantly taking the baby to see specialists and stand over him at all hours of the day. Steve doesn’t fully understand, but he wishes for the baby to be healthy and safe. One night, he meets a figure in his dreams who promises to “fix” the baby, but only if he says yes. As Steve learns, yes can be a very powerful word.


When I first finished this book, I started trying to figure out what, exactly, it was. I’d found it in a box of random books, so there was no context I could use to attempt to classify it. You can tell when a story is meant for children, because it usually has pictures, short chapters, and simple sentences. You can tell when it’s a fairy tale, because there’s a clear plot arc and a clearer moral. You can tell when it’s horror because you feel extreme discomfort and shock as the story unfolds. But what happens when a book is all three? In this article, I will attempt to determine which genre The Nest falls into.


I can’t get too much further into the plot without ruining the book, as there are a few plot twists that I believe are integral to the experience of reading it. These twists are a large part of why I would consider this story to be a part of the horror genre. While reading it, I often gasped out loud or felt my stomach turn because of the frightening nature of the passages. My initial thought was that this was a horror book because of the emotions it evoked, but I realized that classifying it as horror would not do justice to such a complicated book.


I think that this book should also be considered a fairy tale. Like most fairy tales, there are some vaguely supernatural occurrences; things that could possibly be explained, but would be quite a stretch. It was easy for me to pick out the major points of the story, showing that it has a very clear plot. Not even halfway through the book, I could guess what the moral would be–although that didn’t dampen my enjoyment of the book in any way.


Fairy tales are often associated with children’s literature, and this book is no exception. It comes across as a book meant for younger readers: it is rather short, the sentence structure is uncomplicated, and there is an abundance of illustrations. The illustrator, John Klassen, won a Caldecott medal for his work on the popular children’s book This Is Not My Hat, further evidence that The Nest is intended to be primarily a children’s book.


Even though I have determined it to be a children’s book, I would definitely recommend The Nest for people of all ages, especially if you want a quick read that provides many different genres in one succinct and yet enjoyable book.

The cover of the book. Image found here

- Anna