All that aside, this was a good book. Pretty good for a debut novel. The plot was interesting. In some ways I could even relate to the narrator; in some weird ways.
This is a story about a young girl and the people around her. Her parents, her neighbors, peers in school and teachers. The description of a small town in Minnesota was kind of nerve wracking. I lived in a small town in Minnesota myself (albeit a small college town) for about three years, and the bone chilling winter months and hard-to-breathe kind of humid summer months that the author described were spot on! Her vivid descriptions, more than anything else, hooked me to this book.
It was a pretty slow paced book. A young teenage girl, living with her parents in a cabin by a lake in a small Minnesota town, craves for warmth and friendship. She is a loner at school, and friendless, which is what drove our protagonist, Linda, to get close to this strange little family living across from her on the other side of the lake. A young mother and her four-year old child offered Linda a kind of intimacy she did not have in her life, neither at home, nor at school. She wanted someone to like her, she hungered for it. She wanted to be relied on, She wanted to feel loved and needed. And at the end of everything, when things simply went wrong that she had nothing to do with, she felt betrayed. And out of spite, for some kind of revenge if you may, she did her part of “betraying”, or so she tells herself, it appears. Although from a reader’s point of view, I wouldn’t say she did anything wrong.
The strange things that took place in the cute little wooden cabin across from Linda’s shabby one, the events that shook Linda to her core and in many ways shaped her life, sadly, didn’t have much to do with Linda herself at all! But that is life I guess. Sometimes things just happen, and we get all wound up even though we are not directly related in any way.
I thought it was a pretty decent debut novel from Emily Fridlund. It did seem to drag a little at times, but that could just be me. People who enjoy melancholic, contemporary drama, will enjoy this book a lot, I think.
History of Wolves
By Emily Fridlund
Hardcover, 288 pages. Grove Atlantic. January 3, 2017.
Literary Fiction