History of wolves A novel

LINDA, THE PROTAGONIST of Emily Fridlund's debut novel, hails from Minnesota's north woods and says little. If you have spent any amount of time in this part of the country, this reticence should be familiar. It is as if a code of silence blankets the land, much like subfreezing temperatures do for many months of the year. As Linda remarks upon venturing outdoors one afternoon, "My face changed into something other than face, got rubbed out." The cold is indifferent to human comfort and so too, Linda suspects, are most humans - at least to the comfort of others. Linda's earliest years were spent on a commune where child-rearing duties were shared by all adults; at one point she wonders whether her low-energy parents, who meander along the perimeter of the action, never mattering much, are really hers. When a teacher taps a teenage Linda to represent her high school at History Odyssey, she selects wolves as her topic. She is unfazed by the judge's verdict that her report on wolves falls into the category of natural history and so misses the point. The rules of fiction dictate that trouble will start once Linda's attention turns toward people. The first development is the rumor that the aforementioned teacher likes some of his students too much. Then a couple with a young child move into a newly built house across the lake. They are from the ranks of citified "summer people," and Linda observes their halting gestures to inhabit the north with a blend of fascination and scorn. Their relative wealth will not compensate for their inexperience, that is obvious. It is not giving away too much to reveal that after ratcheting up the tension, Fridlund does not take readers to the sunless place many might guess - a warren of child pornographers deep in the woods, an inconvenient hole in the ice. That I was relieved at the slow-motion tragedy that does unfold is testimony to Fridlund's daring. An artful story of sexual awakening and identity formation turns more stomach-churning; child sacrifice takes many forms, and sometimes the act doesn't require bloodshed but simply adults too wedded to their ideals. As the plot pivots toward Linda's growing attachment to the family across the lake, character becomes destiny. The young wife, Patra, has an elfin quality that belies an essential passivity. That the professor husband is named Leo is something of a joke. The only thing leonine about him is the power he wields languorously over his family; he is horrendously ill-equipped to steward the deference shown him. When Linda is hired to babysit for their 4-year-old, she exhibits the impatience one feels only for a creature more or less one's peer - or a competitor for affection. It is unclear, even to Linda herself, which familial role she is playing understudy for. Few images in contemporary fiction have struck me as forcefully as that of Patra bent over in the driveway in anguish, mouth cracked open in a Munchlike silent scream. Fridlund has a tendency to double up on her descriptors, to use two adjectives where one would do. But she is masterly when she lets more scraped-down prose push a series of elemental questions to the fore: Do intentions matter? What price will you pay to feel wanted? How does it feel to be both guilty and exonerated? The result is a novel of ideas that reads like smart pulp, a page-turner of craft and calibration. MEGAN HUSTAD is the author of "More Than Conquerors: A Memoir of Lost Arguments."

Teenager Linda lives near the Walleye Capital of the World, but no one would mistake her Minnesota town for Lake Wobegon. In this chilling story, Linda looks back on her troubled school years, when she was caught up in situations beyond her control or comprehension. The girl's parents are the last holdouts of a failed commune on a northern lake; the family lives in an isolated shack on the town's outskirts with four dogs chained up outside. When Linda takes a job babysitting a little boy named Paul, whose parents have moved in down the road, Paul becomes attached to her. Then something goes horribly wrong and his parents, too, are no help. Indeed, the wolves that Linda is so fascinated by might do a better job of parenting than the clueless adults in this novel. VERDICT -Fridlund is a fine writer who excels at getting inside the head of an unhappy youth and revealing how neglect and isolation scar a child for life. Yet this first novel, as cold and bleak as a Minnesota winter, may be too dark for some readers. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]-Leslie -Patterson, Rehoboth, MA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.