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Summary
Summary
"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 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.
Author Notes
Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota and currently resides in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, Zyzzyva, Five Chapters, New Orleans Review, Sou'wester, New Delta Review, Chariton Review, The Portland Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Fridlund's collection of stories, Catapult , was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award for Fiction and the Tartts First Fiction Award. It won the Mary McCarthy Prize and will be published by Sarabande in 2017. The opening chapter of History of Wolves was published in Southwest Review and won the 2013 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Fridlund's stellar debut novel, 14-year-old Linda, an observant loner growing up in the Minnesota woods, becomes intrigued with the Gardners, the young family that moves in across the lake from her home. As she gets to know them, she realizes that something is amiss. Having been raised in a commune by unconventional parents, Linda is prone to provocative statements and challenging authority. She's also fascinated by the scandal that occurs when Lily Holburn, a student at her school, accuses a teacher, Adam Grierson, of inappropriate behavior but then recants her testimony. At the same time, Linda forges a friendship with the comparatively worldly Patra Gardner and her endearing four-year-old, Paul, whom Linda babysits for a summer before his sudden and mysterious death. Matters take a curious turn once Patra's husband, an older man named Leo, returns after months away at work. Fridlund expertly laces Linda's possessive protectiveness for Patra with something darker, bordering on romantic jealousy. A sense of foreboding subtly permeates the story as Fridlund slowly reveals what happened to Paul. Her wordsmithing is fantastic, rife with vivid turns of phrase. Fridlund has elegantly crafted a striking protagonist whose dark leanings cap off the tragedy at the heart of this book, which is moving and disturbing, and which will stay with the reader. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Fraught with foreboding, Fridlund's first novel is the story of 14-year-old Linda, who lives with her erstwhile cult-member parents in a cabin in the northern Minnesota woods. When new neighbors, the Gardners, move into their summer cottage across the lake, Linda becomes babysitter for their five-year-old son and an increasingly large presence in their lives and they in hers. In the meantime, her new history teacher, Mr. Grierson, has been found to possess child pornography and is fired, but not before he has an alleged affair with one of Linda's classmates, the beautiful Lily with whom Linda is fascinated. The novel moves backward and forward in time to good effect, showing us the enigmatic adult Linda will become. The isolated setting reinforces a theme of loneliness that pervades the book and lends it an often bleak, even desolate, air that reinforces the uncertain, nagging knowledge that something is wrong with the Gardners. The writing is beautiful throughout (the sun broke over the treetops, turning every surface into a flat knife of light; a man is stubborn like a stain) and is a triumph of tone and attitude. Lovers of character-driven literary fiction will embrace this one.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HITLER: Ascent 1889-1939, by Volker Ullrich. Translated by Jefferson Chase. (Vintage, $22.) A new biography dispenses with myths of greatness and destiny that circulate about Hitler: In Ullrich's telling, he emerges as a mediocre, unremarkable man who seized on a moment of political rage to rise to power. This book, the first of two planned volumes, ends on the eve of Germany's invasion of Poland, setting off World War II and eventually leading to his downfall. PERFECT LITTLE WORLD, by Kevin Wilson. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Izzy, a teenager pregnant with her teacher's baby, agrees to join a utopian family experiment that resembles a commune. "It's a novel you keep reading for old-fashioned reasons," our reviewer, John Irving, said. "You also keep reading because you want to know what a good family is. Everyone wants to know that." TRUEVINE: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South, by Beth Macy. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $17.99.) George and Willie Muse, two albino African-American brothers, were exhibited in a circus for years during the 20 th century, a situation close to slavery. How they came to join the show is murky, but the core of Macy's reporting focuses on the boys' mother, Harriett, who doggedly sought to bring them home. HISTORY OF WOLVES, by Emily Fridlund. (Grove, $16.) In Fridlund's debut novel, northern Minnesota's austere landscape sets off a grim coming-of-age story. When a young mother and her son arrive in town, Linda, a teenage loner with a fractured home life, is drawn to them. She soon begins babysitting the child, Paul, and finds herself in an ambiguous family dynamic, made worse after his father returns from Hawaii; the moral choices Linda makes haunt her decades later, when she finally tells her story. AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY: A Love Story, by John Kaag. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) A chance encounter leads Kaag, a philosophy professor, to a library full of masterpieces (early editions of works by Kant, signed copies of Thoreau's writings), transforming his professional and personal trajectories. Our reviewer, Mark Greif, praised the memoir as "a spirited lover's quarrel with the individualism and solipsism in our national thought." DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING, by Madeleine Thien. (Norton, $16.95.) As a child, Marie, the central figure of Thien's novel, and her mother welcome into their home a woman fleeing China after the Tiananmen Square protests. The guest, AnLing, and Marie are linked by their fathers: The men used music to cope with the regime and to remain steadfast to each another during the Cultural Revolution.
School Library Journal Review
Winter falls hard in northern Minnesota. So 14-year-old Linda watches with interest when, months before the thaw, a young mother and her son return alone to their summer house across the lake. Linda is drawn into their lives when the mother, Patra, asks her to watch four-year-old Paul while Patra edits manuscripts. Linda is deeply affected by the intensity of Patra's care for Paul, so different from the nonchalance of her own mother. The teen is an untamed storyteller, and her past and present swing about as she interrupts one plot thread in pursuit of another, as if the emotional connections among events supersede chronology. A succession of days spent with Patra and Paul veer into a deluge of memories from Linda's childhood in a commune or recollections of her former history teacher, who may have molested a classmate. Fridlund's crystalline descriptions keep the narrative focused, but nearly everything else in the book, including Linda's true name, is subject to interpretation. The author foreshadows tragedy, which arrives with the unimaginable brutality of a Minnesotan blizzard. VERDICT Teens who appreciated the natural settings and poetic writing of Ron Rash's The World Made Straight and The Cove or the stylistic complexity of Louise Erdrich's The Round House will love this one. This strikingly original tale, so rooted in its natural setting, will captivate readers with a penchant for powerful, unorthodox prose.-Diane Colson, Librarian, City -College, Gainesville, FL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
A teenager struggles to come of age in a world of religious zealots and predatory teachers in this stark debut The coming-of-age novel can be almost as painful as actually coming of age. It's a genre that demands a tricky combination of narrative knowingness and character naivety, while recruiting the reader's sympathies for one of God's least sympathetic creations: the teenager. Even so, many novelists choose it for their debut, and last year offered two examples that exemplified both the successes and frustrations of the form. Emma Cline's The Girls was a woozy hormonal fug that found the horror in the thrill of growing up; Tiffany McDaniels' The Summer that Melted Everything smothered its story's gothic potential in stentorian hindsight. Emily Fridlund's debut falls between the two. Teenage narrator Linda gets called "commie" and "freak" by her schoolmates, and it's small wonder that she doesn't fit in when her background has precision-tooled her for oddness. Raised by parents who are the last vestiges of a failed cult, she lives a semi-wilderness life in a cabin at the edge of a lake, on the fringe of a northern Minnesota forest. Uncomfortable in the world, she spreads discomfort about her: "I was flat-chested, plain as a bannister. I made people feel judged." Life offers her two simultaneous chances to fit in, although both -- as we know from the start -- go terribly wrong. Firstly, there's Mr Grierson, a new teacher who encourages Linda to enter the "History Odyssey" inter-school competition. Linda gives a presentation on the history of wolves, from which the novel takes its name. There is no such thing as a true "alpha wolf", she tells her audience (and the reader): instead, "an alpha animal may only be alpha at certain times for a specific reason". Linda memorises those lines like "an amendment to the constitution". What they teach her about power changes her life, and directs the story of the novel. Secondly, there's four-year-old Paul, who along with his mother Patra moves into the cabin across the water from Linda. Linda's background means she's only really seen how to be a kid from the outside: "I remembered children from the playground where I'd watched them when I was growing up. Plus, I'd read some books with children in them," she says. Paul is her chance to belong to a real family, to learn to be normal. Unfortunately, Paul is not normal. His parents are deeply involved in Christian Science and Paul himself is, we learn on page four, doomed. This should be a recipe for morbid curiosity. But when everything is explicitly foreshadowed, nothing is at stake Mr Grierson is not much better off. His concern for his pupils is not limited to innocent encouragement, and his fall is flagged soon after his introduction. God and grooming, child death and grotty sex, blame and betrayal -- this should be a recipe for morbid curiosity. But when everything is explicitly foreshadowed, nothing is at stake. Fridlund carries on meticulously dressing her traps long after they've been sprung. In some ways, this is the standard literary fiction shortcoming of thinking plot is the least important part. In others, Fridlund's weaknesses are her own. Characters tend to be vague outlines with tics. Leo tucks his shirt in a lot; Linda's mother baptises her obsessively. But there are none of the subtle mechanisms that make characters coherent -- and capable of acting surprisingly. There is only one mood: slow and sad. A good teenage novel needs some riot with its woe (The Bell Jar, for example, is enormously funny, as well as being a book about suicide). Having given up the plot goods early, Fridlund's hold on the reader slips too. For a novel that aspires to say something about about power, History of Wolves is strikingly impotent. - Sarah Ditum.
Kirkus Review
An atmospheric, near-gothic coming-of-age novel turns on the dance between predator and prey.Fridlunds debut won the McGinnis-Ritchie Award in 2013 for its first chapter. Its a 17-page stunner that begins with a child ghost and ends in a chorus of communal condemnation. The novel itself unfurls in far northern Minnesota, where a 14-year-old named Mattie Furston, who calls herself Linda, is living on a failed commune with her parents. She's hungry in flesh and spirit, a backwoods outcast among hockey players in their yellowed caps...cheerleaders with their static-charged bangs. She chops wood and cleans fish with her father, who was kind to objects. With people he was a little afraid. When a young woman moves with her 4-year-old son into a new cabin across the lake, the teenage Linda, who's looking back on these events as an adult, is hired to babysit. Fridlund is an assured writer: she knows how water tuts against a boat hull and how mosquitoes descend into any patch of shade. Her sense of cold freezes the reader: Beneath a foot of ice, beneath my boots, the walleye drifted. They did not try to swim, or do anything that required effort. They hovered, waiting winter out with driftwood, barely beating their hearts. As dread coils around Linda, the novel gives up its secrets slowly. One concerns an eighth-grade teacher accused of owning child porn; another is tangled in the newcomer familys Christian Science. Fridlund circles these threads around each other in tightening, mesmerizing loops. The novel has a tinge of fairy tale, wavering on the blur between good and evil, thought and action. But the sharp consequences for its characters make it singe and singa literary tour de force. Four years after its initial prize, this slender work is worth the wait. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When scandal shakes Madeline's small town, she is left feeling betrayed by her favorite teacher Mr. Grierson. Despite her curiosity about the stories flying around regarding Mr. Grierson and a classmate, Madeline tries to find ways to distract herself. She decides that the family who just moved in next door is enough to interest her and soon has a job as the babysitter, or governess as they like to say, for their four-year-old son, Paul. As time goes on, Madeline feels increasingly uneasy with the family and the situation, and her hunch proves right, as everything changes when a tragedy occurs. Susan Bennett's narration is downright creepy, as her voice captures the foreboding of the story. There is not much distinction among characters, but there is just enough variation that the narration is easy to follow. It is uncomfortable to listen to at times, but that seems to have been the author's intention. Verdict This will appeal to those who enjoy dark stories, and while some sections are slow, it will interest those who pick up on small details and like to solve mysteries.-Emma Manfred, Glastonbury, CT © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.