History of Wolves: A Novel

by Emily Fridlund

Hardcover, 2017

Status

Available

Call number

FICTION Fridlund

Barcode

10037

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Atlantic Monthly Press (2017), Edition: 1st Edition, 288 pages

Description

Fiction. Literature. HTML: "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..… (more)

Media reviews

Los Angeles Times

With her overflowing cauldron of contradictions — sexually curious and naïve, an outsider taunted by her classmates who longs to become something other than herself — Linda seems as much prey as predator, akin to the wolves she studies.... Regardless of one’s judgment about the characters’

mistakes and shortcomings, the chilly power of “History of Wolves” packs a wallop that’s hard to shake off. In the process, Fridlund — who received a Ph.D. in creative writing from USC — has constructed an elegant, troubling debut, both immersed in the natural world but equally concerned with issues of power, family, faith and the gap between understanding something and being able to act on the knowledge.

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Chicago Review of Books

Fridlund’s novel is compelling and deliberate. Tension is seeded throughout the narrative at just the right intervals, even though the incident at the core of the novel—the death of young Paul Gardner—is known from page two. The mystery surrounding Paul’s death does its work to pull the

reader along, but Linda and her longing is our focal point. The fallout of Paul’s death is quickly concluded, though it’s apparent that the events of that summer still weigh on her in adulthood. What’s not so clear is exactly what continues to follow Linda. Is it the loss of her friend? Is it the intimacy she failed to find in Mr. Grierson, Lily, or Patra? Or is it the way that Leo Gardner, Paul’s father, led her to question how she views the world? ... History of Wolves is artfully told, leaving the reader as scattered and wanting as the adult Linda who shares her childhood stories. She invites us to intensely long for the same things she does: intimacy, understanding, and a clear place in life. This is a difficult poetry to achieve in literature.

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New York Times

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.... 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.

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National Public Radio (NPR)

History of Wolves follows a 14-year-old girl named Madeline, though nobody calls her that: "At school, I was called Linda, or Commie, or Freak." ... Perhaps the greatest accomplishment in the novel is Fridlund's portrayal of Linda, who the reader encounters not just as a teenager, but, in brief

flash-forward scenes, as an adult still psychically wounded from the events of the summer. Sometimes people overcome the traumas they were subjected to as children; sometimes they don't. For most people, and for Linda, it's somewhere in between.... Looking in hindsight isn't any more accurate than trying to predict the future, of course; and neither really works out for Linda. But she's such an incredible character — both typical and special, sometimes capable of great love and sometimes spectacularly not — that it's hard to turn away from her sometimes horrifying story.

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