“So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. And I mean that in the best way. What powerful tension and depth this provides “–Aimee Bender Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige … stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and an outlander at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is charged with possessing child pornography, the implications of his arrest deeply affect Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong.
And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. It seems that her life finally has purpose but with this new sense of belonging she is also drawn into secrets she doesn’t understand. Over the course of a few days, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. As she struggles to find a way out of the sequestered world into which she was born, Linda confronts the life-and-death consequences of the things people do–and fail to do–for the people they love.
Winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie award for its first chapter, Emily Fridlund’s propulsive and gorgeously written History of Wolves introduces a new writer of enormous range and talent.more
Good fiction but gives one food for thought.
It’s been years since I’ve felt so satisfied, mesmerized, sideswiped by a book. At first, the story seems to meander, seems random, somehow deliciously unplanned, and then just as deliciously, Fridlund folds everything in—with so little fanfare, so few devices, so natural and quiet and strange and honest a stroke of the pen. Some readers might miss it if they aren’t paying enough attention, aren’t drinking things in. Read this slowly. There’s beauty in its darkness and light touch, a truly human frailty revealed, with all its awful and unspoken complications. I’m astonished that this novel taking place in the backwoods of Minnesota, in a rural Midwest that is so often relegated to “regional fiction,” can be taking over the imaginations of so many and so widely. It’s well deserved. Bravo Emily Fridlund.
This book is beautifully written – that’s the first thing to say about it. The language is sensitive and evocative. The landscape – woodlands and lakes, once wild but now increasingly encroached upon by civilisation – is very well described and the characters are depicted with delightful nuance of gesture and expression.
The storyline concerns a teenage girl, something of a loner, who lives in a remote and dilapidated cabin with her parents but, unlike them, engages with the community by attending school and befriending a newcomer family. It is her interactions with this family throughout the course of eight or nine months which is the primary plotline. The narrative is told partly from her point of view as a teenager and partly from a later date, with the hindsight of age, but, it seemed to me, time and distance had done little to help her understand the events of that period.
Woven into the main plot are other tendrils – too tenuous and unresolved to call threads – concerning a teacher who is accused of paedophilia and a girl called Lily, his supposed victim. These figures continue to interest the protagonist into her later life but their contribution towards the book’s dramatic and thematic impetus was far too unresolved for my liking.
It is always important to get a handle on what a book is about – quite different, of course, to what happens in it – and this is where I begin to come unstuck with this one. I can make a stab at it, but to give the impression that the themes are fully worked out would be misleading. The title ought to be a clue, but I’d say that A Sociology of Wolves might be a better steer. Apart from a school project about wolves and a taxidermy example at a local park, the closest we get to any actual wolves is the pack of dogs kept by the narrator’s family, which is wild enough to need chaining up. Wolves, we know, are usually pack animals with a very defined hierarchy, experts at working together, territorial and, as civilisation encroaches further and further into the wilderness, becoming increasingly integrated into the urban environment. Outside of the packs, lone wolves operate independently, having to be extremely self-reliant, adaptable, cunning and resourceful. Naturally the wolf is capable of domestication, over time, its strengths being harnessed to aid people as hunters, protectors, herders, retrievers, companions and rescuers. Taking that as my baseline I can say that this book is about the ‘packs’ we humans make for ourselves: families, communes, religious groups. The narrator’s family is now a nuclear unit but was once part of a commune which established itself in the woods, survived for a while but then broke down. The newcomers are members of a Christian Science Church whose beliefs have a dramatic impact on the outworking of the plot. Lily is a Native American girl living on a reserve. Frankly, though, none of these packs come across as very appealing or shining examples of cohesive community. Perhaps that’s the point.
Even the paedophile, I suppose, could be described as being part of a distinct sub-group. At the same time he is a lone wolf, moving (hounded?) from place to place as his past catches up with him. Perhaps this is why the narrator finds herself so interested in him. She, too, is a loner, shifting her persona depending on where she is and who she is with. She is Madeline at home, Mattie at school, Linda to her friends at the new cabin. She hovers on the line between normal human interaction and a watchful, distanced, stance. Her relationships with Patra, the mother at the cabin, and Lily, the school girl, are very ambiguous. Sometimes she seems fascinated, sometimes affectionate. Occasionally I wondered if she was sexually attracted to them, at others it seemed her interest was very predatory. There were points when she makes what seem to be kindly gestures, other moments when, crucially, with the opportunity to do an honest, altruistic thing, she withholds it.
Overall the impression is a somewhat bleak one. I did not come away from this book feeling reassured. I think it would be a good choice for reading groups, though. Lots and lots to discuss.
the good: fantastic writing
the bad: tough to read if you’re used to and more comfortable in convention bc it jumps around and you’re not sure where the story is going, why is this scene here? how much longer before we find out what happened? there is a ton of detail and excess so i ended up skimming and jumping ahead, but i’m an impatient reader. if you like that stuff, you’ll love it.
What is with this trend of books with completely emotionless narrators/main characters? I’ve read a whole bunch of books this year that have gotten rave reviews and yet are BORING and lifeless because the main character is apparently a robot with zero emotional components. This is another one. It does not make for interesting reading.
I sat with this book in my lap trying very hard not to sob. The story of Linda, the teenager living in the woods with her ex-commune parents took my breath away and it took a few moments to breathe again. The story begins one year when Linda is in high school. As high school can often be it is full of labels and for Linda a friendless world. LInda walks miles to and from school in the cold snow and it is during this time that you will begin to know her. One day she notices a couple and their son moving into a recently constructed cabin across the lake from her cabin and soon after LInda becomes entwined in the lives of the Gardner’s. There are interweaving stories of a fellow high school girl that Linda becomes fixated with when she notices their teacher being overly attentive towards her and of the same teacher reaching out to Linda. You will be drawn into the story slowly and will feel loss when it is over. The woods, the lonely girl, the secondary characters all mesh perfectly in the History of the Wolves.