The History of Wolves

I stumbled upon Emily Fridlund's debut novel quite by accident, but once I began reading, I felt I had locked eyes with a wolf in the wild: fully entranced, it sent shivers of excitement, terror, and disbelief up and down my spine in an instant.

The plot synopsis from GoodReads says, "Linda has an idiosyncratic home life: her parents live in abandoned commune cabins in northern Minnesota and are hanging on to the last vestiges of a faded counter-culture world. The kids at school call her 'Freak', or 'Commie'. She is an outsider in all things. Her understanding of the world comes from her observations at school, where her teacher is accused of possessing child pornography, and from watching the seemingly ordinary life of a family she babysits for. Yet while the accusation against the teacher is perhaps more innocent than it seemed at first, the ordinary family turns out to be more complicated. As Linda insinuates her way into the family's orbit, she realises they are hiding something. If she tells the truth, she will lose the normal family life she is beginning to enjoy with them; but if she doesn't, their son may die.

Superbly-paced and beautifully written, HISTORY OF WOLVES is an extraordinary debut novel about guilt, innocence, negligence, well-meaning belief and the death of a child."

I felt such worry for Linda in that given her own less-than-conventional upbringing, she was not equipped to care for 4 year old Paul Gardener in a way that would allow her to understand that something was amiss. I wanted at several points to shout out, "That's not normal! You should tell someone!" But alas, no one had done that for her, so how was she to know?

There were also times when I wanted to gaurd Linda herself, to reach out and grab her by the arm and say, "Come on, we've got to get out of here. This isn't going to turn out well!" It really made me feel I was witnessing a tragedy and powerless to stop it.

Throughout the book, Linda relies on her obsevational skills and instincts. That would be great fodder for book club discussion! In fact, there is much about Linda's own ruminations regarding her life and experiences that would fuel great discussion! (For example, the differences between thoughts and actions, parenting styles, and if there is social boundary between religious beliefs and a community's need to protect its most vulnerable members just to name a few.) It would be great to hear the differing views between readers, each coming to the book with their own background assumptions and experiences.

Once I started, I found it very hard to put this book down. I gave History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 4 out of 5 stars on GoodReads.

From the Author's Website . . .

One of the most daring literary debuts of the season, History of Wolves is a profound and propulsive novel from an urgent, new voice in American fiction.
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Teenage Linda lives with her parents in the 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 outsider at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is faced with child pornography charges, his arrest deeply affects Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong.
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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. But with this new sense of belonging come expectations and secrets she doesn’t understand. Over the course of a summer, 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.
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Winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie award for its first chapter, and A BEA Buzz Book and An ABA Indies Introduce Selection, Emily Fridlund’s agonizing and gorgeously written History of Wolves introduces a new writer of enormous range and talent.

About the Author . . .

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, FiveChapters, New Orleans Review, Sou'wester, New Delta Review, Chariton Review, Portland Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Fridlund's collection of stories, Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and will be published by Sarabande in 2017.

Eleanor Will Haunt Your Thoughts (In a Good Way!)

Eleanor, by Jason Gurley, is an emotionally charged and gripping tale of family trauma, dysfunction, and reclamation. I was hooked from the get-go! (For a plot synopsis, please see the “From the Publisher” section below.)

Gurley’s characters are well-developed and immediately drew me into the storyline. The tragic circumstances that hang like an invisible pall over each of them added to the urgency of identifying with each character from the main protagonist, young Eleanor, to Aunt Gerry and Jack, Eleanor’s best friend and love interest.

While the main tragedies that befall the Witt family are events we witness on the news any given day, I really enjoyed the fact that Gurley adds a “paranormal” twist to the disappearances Eleanor experiences. This twist was the added traction that kept me up past bedtime reading “just one more section” after another!

I think book clubs would find much to discuss in this book. The perils of motherhood. Issues of mental illness and addiction. How tragedy and trauma unfold in lives and through generations. What happens after death. What is the purpose and nature of our hopes and dreams (both waking and the dream world’s we weave in our unconscious minds/sleep).

Eleanor is a book that will appeals to a variety of readers. I am happy to tell my friends and family about this great read!

Thanks to Blogging For Books for the ARC I received in exchange for this honest review of the book.

From the Publisher . . .

Eleanor and Esmerelda are identical twins with a secret language all their own, inseparable until a terrible accident claims Esme’s life. Eleanor’s family is left in tatters: her mother retreats inward, seeking comfort in bottles; her father reluctantly abandons ship. Eleanor is forced to grow up more quickly than a child should, and becomes the target of her mother’s growing rage.

Years pass, and Eleanor’s painful reality begins to unravel in strange ways. The first time it happens, she walks through a school doorway, and finds herself in a cornfield, beneath wide blue skies. When she stumbles back into her own world, time has flown by without her. Again and again, against her will, she falls out of her world and into other, stranger ones, leaving behind empty rooms and worried loved ones.

One fateful day, Eleanor leaps from a cliff and is torn from her world altogether. She meets a mysterious stranger, Mea, who reveals to Eleanor the weight of her family’s loss. To save her broken parents, and rescue herself, Eleanor must learn how deep the well of her mother’s grief and her father’s heartbreak truly goes. Esmerelda’s death was not the only tragic loss in her family’s fragmented history, and unless Eleanor can master her strange new abilities, it may not be the last.

About the Author . . .

JASON GURLEY is the author of Greatfall, The Man Who Ended the World, and the fiction collection Deep Breath Hold Tight, among other works. His stories have appeared in the anthologies Loosed Upon the World and Help Fund My Robot Army!!! He was raised in Alaska and Texas, and now lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.