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History of Wolves: Shortlisted for the 2017…
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History of Wolves: Shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize (original 2017; edition 2017)

by Emily Fridlund (Author)

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1,2747914,964 (3.56)1 / 126
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"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)
Member:floremolla
Title:History of Wolves: Shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize
Authors:Emily Fridlund (Author)
Info:Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2017)
Collections:Fiction completed, Your library
Rating:***1/2
Tags:None

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History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (2017)

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» See also 126 mentions

English (78)  German (1)  All languages (79)
Showing 1-5 of 78 (next | show all)
Not a fan of this muddled story that left me confused and a little depressed.

( )
  hmonkeyreads | Jan 25, 2024 |
Madeline, who refers to herself as Linda, is a fourteen year old girl living in Minnesota with her family. She's drawn to one of her classmates, Lily, and the new history teacher Mr. Grierson, who gets charged with child pornography. When a new family moves in, Linda babysits for their little boy, Paul.

Early on we learn that Paul has "gone from living to dead" and the story alternates between finding out what happened to Paul and Mr. Grierson/Lily. I really wanted to love this book but it just didn't do it for me. The story is slow and not much happened even though the premise seems otherwise. I found the main character to be unlikeable. The writing is beautiful but not enough to save the book. ( )
  Lauranthalas | Jul 24, 2023 |
Set in a remote town in Minnesota, History of Wolves initially paints a picture of loner Linda developing a crush on her male teacher, leading the reader to leap to some ready assumptions about where this book is headed. However, the story soon diverges when the Gardiner family mores into a nearby home. Leo, Patra and son Paul all seem a little strange, and Linda gravitates towards them, eventually getting work as Paul's baby-sitter.

Linda makes Patra into an object of affection and is very uncomfortable when her academic husband Leo shows up. Caring for Paul is something of a challenge for her; he is both backward and infuriating at times, but Linda manages to get him interested in games mimicking her woodcraft skills.

Eventually this scenario goes sour, as Leo starts to assert his authority and tries to get rid of Linda. She resists, but it does not end well.

I mostly enjoyed this book and would probably rate it more highly except that I found the ending very dissatisfying, and Fridlund's attempt to reconcile the Gardiner and teacher threads of her story felt very unconvincing to me. ( )
  gjky | Apr 9, 2023 |
Never, and I do mean never, have I read an author with the mastery of writing the perfect “telling detail” as Fridlund. Sentence after sentence gives the reader the full sensory experience: I could see every scene, feel every feeling, taste every taste as if I were physically present in the book. She’s the next Donna Tartt in that regard. The prose alone makes this book deserving of its long list status. In addition, there’s real suspense here, and it propels you to keep reading; who doesn’t love that? Unfortunately, the plot doesn’t quite hold up to the lofty standard set by the writing. The ending should pack a bigger wallop then it actually does, and is going to leave at least some readers puzzled. I had to revisit some parts of the book to assure myself that I was comfortable with my own understanding. There are two main plot lines, and I felt one was much better developed (and also somewhat more interesting) than the other. The author made some plot choices that rely on readers having strong inference skills, and I do like books that make the reader work a bit, but I felt like to really be all that it could be, this book needed to make some plot points a bit more explicit. All in all, I completely enjoyed this one; I love dark books, and I love great writing – – give me both in one package, and I’m a happy reader!

Writing quality: 5/5
Originality: 4/5
Character Development: 4/4
Plot Development: 2/4
Overall Enjoyment: 2/2 ( )
  Anita_Pomerantz | Mar 23, 2023 |
Well written ( )
  cathy.lemann | Mar 21, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 78 (next | show all)
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.
added by Lemeritus | editLos Angeles Times, Paula Woods (pay site) (Jan 20, 2017)
 
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.
 
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.
added by Lemeritus | editNew York Times, Megan Hustad (pay site) (Jan 6, 2017)
 
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.
 

» Add other authors (11 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Emily Fridlundprimary authorall editionscalculated
Bennett, SusanNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Vries, Erik deTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual,—neither in nor of matter,— and the body will then utter no complaints.

—Mary Baker Eddy,
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins.

—Timothy Donnelly, “The New Intelligence”
Dedication
For Nick
First words
It's not that I never think about Paul.
Quotations
...when the commune fell apart, my mother had traded whatever hippie fanaticism she had left for Christianity. For as long as I could remember she went to church three times a week—Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday—because she held out hope that penance worked, that some of the past could be reversed, slowly and over years.
...in my groggy state I called her Patra. “Morning, Patra,” I said, surprising myself. As if Patra were not a proper name, but a feeling I’d once had—a lost feeling come back, something not unlike happiness.
You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there’s always something wrong. Everywhere you look, there are insects thickening the air, and birds rifling trees, and enormous, heavy leaves dragging down branches. You want to trammel it, wreck it, smash things down. The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters.
What’s the difference between what you want to believe and what you do?
And what’s the difference between what you think and what you end up doing?
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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.

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