Contemporary Authors

• History of Wolves: A Novel Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2017
• Catapult: Stories Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY), 2017

1. Catapult : stories LCCN 2017002604 Type of material Book Personal name Fridlund, Emily, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title Catapult : stories / by Emily Fridlund. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Louisville, KY : Sarabande Books, [2017] Projected pub date 1710 Description pages cm ISBN 9781946448057 (pbk. : alk. paper) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. History of wolves : a novel LCCN 2016027800 Type of material Book Personal name Fridlund, Emily, author. Main title History of wolves : a novel / Emily Fridlund. Edition First edition. First Grove Atlantic Hardcover Edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017. Description 279 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780802125873 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PS3606.R536 H57 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Powell's - http://www.powells.com/post/interviews/powells-interview-emily-fridlund-author-of-history-of-wolves

  INTERVIEWS
  Powell's Interview: Emily Fridlund, Author of 'History of Wolves'
  by Jill Owens, January 6, 2017 4:03 PM
  History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

  Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves is one of the most powerful debuts we've read in a long time. T. C. Boyle raves that it's "as exquisite a first novel as I've ever encountered. Poetic, complex, and utterly, heartbreakingly beautiful," and Aimee Bender calls it "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." History of Wolves is the story of Linda, an isolated teenager raised in a defunct commune in a small northern Minnesota town. As the book begins, one of her teachers is arrested for child pornography, and a new family (Leo, Patra, and their toddler son, Paul), with whom Linda becomes increasingly entangled, moves in across the lake. Fridlund connects and layers these separate elements and relationships into a seamless tragic narrative of unbearable consequences, in gorgeous, exceptional prose. This is an unforgettable novel.

  Jill Owens: The first chapter of History of Wolves won the McGinnis-Ritchie Award. Was that after the whole book was complete, or did it exist as a standalone piece at some point?

  Emily Fridlund: It was absolutely a standalone story first. I wrote it initially for a writing workshop at the University of Southern California when I was working on my PhD there. I finished it, and I really did think I was done. I published it, and I meant to go on and do other things. But when I was thinking about a novel idea and a world that I might want to linger in longer, Linda's voice came back to me.

  She was just interesting enough that I felt like it might be worth staying with her a little longer, and her world, even in that short story, felt especially vivid to me. So after a little while I did go back to it and begin to extend it into the other pieces of the novel.

  Initially I really did think I was done. I had written stories for a long time. I generally thought of myself as a story writer. I was thinking about novel ideas, but I didn't think of it as a potential beginning until after I wrote it.

  Jill: That's interesting because it feels like all the elements of the novel are present in that first chapter — Mr. Grierson and Lily, and Linda's family history, and then her relationship with Paul.

  Fridlund: I should say, the pieces with Patra and Paul and the Gardners — they were not in the initial story. I think it's the first paragraph that opens the book — that moment when Linda, as an adult, is looking back and remembering Paul — that was not a part of the first draft of the story, and there might possibly be one other reference. When I went to lengthen the story and weave several different options together, I did go back and think about how to frame it.
  It's a fun place to be as a writer, to play in that gap between knowing and not knowing.
  Actually, now that you mention it, I remember initially thinking of that first chapter as maybe more like a prologue, something that would stand apart from the rest of the book. But it seemed to work in terms of creating the voice and establishing the place, which is really important, and also setting up some of the themes that I wanted to get at, related to thinking and action and responsibility and guilt. The voice and place and themes seemed to lead into the second chapter and introducing the Gardners.

  Jill: Linda does have such a distinctive voice. She's got these great sharp and dry observations, which almost make her sound like a slightly alien intelligence sometimes.

  Fridlund: [Laughter] That's a great way of putting it. I love it.

  Jill: I also think her voice stems so much from the fact of her age, the fact that she's 14 years old, and she is in between so many things.

  Fridlund: I think you're absolutely right. That adolescent voice has always been very interesting to me. It has this potential for being really canny and sharp and thought-provoking. But also, because young people are young, they don't have a lot of experience, and so there can be that potential for innocence or ignorance. I think those qualities are amplified by Linda's unusual background, being raised in this commune in a really isolated place, and being socially outcast, in a way.

  Her character is so observant, she takes in the world so meticulously, in part because she's such an outsider. She wants to watch everyone else to get along and to understand what's going on.

  In some ways she's taking in more than others and seeing more than others. But there is a limit to that. She also has these incredible blind spots because of her inexperience. That was very interesting for me to think about.

  It's a fun place to be as a writer, to play in that gap between knowing and not knowing. Also, recognizing that the reader might know things that she might not, especially as the novel progresses. She's not familiar with the world of the Gardners in a way that a reader might be.

  Jill: You mentioned that place is incredibly important in this novel. In terms of the woods and the lake and the isolation, the setting itself is a driving force of the novel, to a degree.

  You grew up in Minnesota. How much did you draw from your own experiences for the book?

  Fridlund: I'm a city girl. I grew up in the Twin Cities. I'm from the suburbs, really. We had a little, scrappy bit of woods in our backyard. My parents were big fans of camping and getting us out to the woods.

  I grew up with a love of being outside, and being in the woods, and going up north, especially to the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota, and camping, and that kind of thing.

  So I am definitely not from that part of the world, but that region in northern Minnesota — north of Brainerd, west of Duluth — is a place I visited. Actually, I went back there when I was just beginning to extend the short story into a novel.

  But I have to say, it's an invented place as well. Part of what I realized when I was writing that initial story was just how much the voice and the place offered themselves to me together. In part, it seemed like the place of the book was a little bit about getting at how Linda experienced the world, and how she takes in the world.

  So part of the isolation she feels, and also the longing and the love of the woods, and her dogs, and all the things she can't really say... In a way, she's quite articulate, but there's also a lot she can't say. As a writer, I was often thinking about how to get at that, what can't be said, through her physical experiences in the woods and being outside and situating her emotional life in her world, in her place. So the place was really important, but I also always thought of it as atmosphere as much as a concrete place.

  Jill: That makes a lot of sense. I like that you mentioned the dogs in relation to the place, too. Her dogs are this underlying presence, this other responsibility, and I found it interesting that Linda says that when she dreams about this time in her life, she dreams about the dogs — there's a surreality there but also her love for the dogs comes through, and it relates to a lot of other things in the book.

  Fridlund: I'm glad you said that. That's good to hear. I actually had more dog writing in the book. [Laughter] It just seemed like a way to get at Linda's passion and love — her capacity for love and also her capacity for guilt without her actually coming out and talking about those more abstract concepts.

  Her dogs are important to her. I love dogs, too. Dogs are good. [Laughter]

  Jill: I have to admit, as someone who has never been to that part of the world, Garrison Keillor did occasionally enter my mind. [Laughter] As a part of my conception of northern Minnesota. I thought it was really funny when Linda says that she imagines him as one of her relatives, like a more gregarious, less tough version of her dad, basically.

  Fridlund: Right, for sure. You can't grow up in Minnesota and not feel the overwhelming presence lurking everywhere of Garrison Keillor. I recognize that talking about Minnesota means that, for a lot of people, Garrison Keillor will come to mind.

  Jill: The first time I read this book, I had a stronger emotional reaction to it than anything I've read in years. I almost thought I wouldn't be able to do this interview because I couldn't talk about the book without crying. I think a lot of that is my parent-brain — I have a two-year-old son, and so to read about Paul's death was absolutely agonizing — but I think it was more than that, too; it's just an incredibly powerful wallop of a book, with, as Aimee Bender said, this "sledgehammer of pain” inside it. How did writing the book affect you emotionally?

  Fridlund: First, I'm sorry if I put you through anything. But it's meaningful to hear that, that you had a strong emotional response. It's a dark book, for sure.

  I will say I don't have children right now. I have almost felt like I wanted to warn mothers in particular that it could be hard to read this book if you have small children. It's never easy to read about the death of a child.

  I actually wrote the initial draft quite quickly over the course of a month a few years back. I wasn't thinking a lot about what would happen to the draft, or where it would go, or what I would do with it. I think that a lot of the emotional core of the book got onto the page right away in that initial draft. I wonder now if I would have been able to capture that if I'd written more slowly, which I tend to do, actually. I'm usually a very slow writer. There was something about just writing the vast majority of it quite quickly, and then revising it over the years, and really thinking about the structure, and the themes over the years after that initial draft.
  I was often thinking about how to get at that, what can't be said, through her physical experiences in the woods and being outside and situating her emotional life in her world, in her place.
  I have to say, there are scenes even now that actually do choke me up a little bit. There's a moment when Patra confronts Linda in the parking lot after the trial, and she is accusing her of thinking in the wrong way, in part, I think, just lashing out in pain herself, in a moment when she is struggling to deal with her own incredible grief.

  And it was a betrayal. Linda feels betrayed by Patra, and then Linda goes back into the trial and, in her own way, betrays Patra in return. That moment always was a little hard for me. Was there a moment in particular for you that felt really hard?

  Jill: That's a tough one. I think in part it's his last day, and part of it is related to the pacing, which is masterfully done. After a certain point, you know generally what's coming but you're flashing forward in time, and then continuing to go back to get closer and closer to the time of his death — during that day. It's just excruciating. It's knowing that that's coming and that it's preventable, but it's not going to be prevented — it's really emotionally powerful.

  Fridlund: That's interesting. It's something I thought about — where to reveal what. That was a more technical set of questions. But I always knew that I wanted to reveal Paul's death before the end of the first section of the book.

  While the whole book jumps around in time, I always thought of the first half as a little bit more closely aligned with Linda as a teenager. This idea that I'm trying to get the reader to empathize and feel what she feels as it's coming, and without knowing exactly what is happening.

  Then actually, speaking of Aimee Bender, she was the very first reader of this piece. She once gave me a piece of advice. She said, "If you know something's going to happen, you may as well spend it, or say it, and then see what happens."

  I remember coming to some point in the book about halfway through and just deciding to release that information about Paul's death, and then to think about the consequences. That opened up the second half of the book for me, which I always thought of as a little bit more closely aligned with Linda as an adult, and the more retrospective voice, and her thinking about how we do go back as human beings to moments, to relive them and try to understand them in new ways, and how painful that can be in the process.

  It's weird, because I wanted to get at that feeling of how when something has already happened, it feels inevitable. But of course, it wasn't for her. It didn't have to be inevitable. This death was totally unnecessary. That was the crux of the feeling I wanted to get at.

  Jill: I think you do a fantastic job of that, and the way you describe it there, you were setting yourself up for a difficult task.

  Did you know, once you started expanding the story, that you wanted to focus on guilt and responsibility and thinking and acting?

  Fridlund: When I wrote the story, I was thinking about guilt and also complicity in terms of thinking and acting, and specifically in terms of child pornography.

  Those ideas resonated with some of the things I was thinking about and larger questions that I had related to ideas of storytelling, and the ways in which people recruit others into the stories that they tell through the self-justifying stories that they want to tell, or need to tell, often at the expense of others, or often ignoring the desperate needs of others.

  I was thinking about that in the context of well-meaning belief, and what we do to the people we love. Sometimes all of us. Leo had his belief system. Patra, through the choices she made to be a part of this world. Linda, through her desperate desire to maintain this little measure of happiness she had found with this family.
  I probably think in terms of language — especially rhythm, the rhythm of sentences — more than anything else.
  They all have something to lose by disturbing the status quo. In the meantime, Paul is the victim of that desire on everyone else's behalf to maintain what little happiness they've found. That was the bigger idea that I was thinking about.

  Also, I was thinking about storytelling. When I was weaving in the story of Mr. Grierson and Lily, I was thinking about who controls the stories that create the realities that people come to believe, and how that happens differently in different contexts.

  And I was thinking about guilt. I think there's part of Linda that identifies with Mr. Grierson because of her guilt.

  Jill: I loved when you describe how Paul takes Linda for granted — that he doesn't know where his body stops and hers begins, in terms of things like him plopping onto her lap, which feels very apt to me, as the parent. But I also thought it was very telling in terms of Linda's blurriness of self, and trying to figure out who she does identify with. Sometimes she identifies with Mr. Grierson, and sometimes with Lily, and sometimes with Patra.

  Fridlund: Absolutely. Again, I think there's an element of that in growing up, of trying to figure out who you are, but it's also the way I think of identity in general, that we identify with different people at different moments.

  I always thought of Linda as being situated right in between Paul and Patra in terms of age. At some point, I decided that it would be 11 years between each of them. And there’s this kind of sliding that Linda does. She can be a child sometimes herself and identify more with Paul, and at other times identify more with the adult, Patra, or even with Leo. She has a little bit of a competitiveness with Leo, for sure.

  I think all people do that sliding. In different contexts, we play different roles. I was definitely thinking about that in terms of predator and prey, too. Part of the initial idea of the first chapter was to figure out what might be called a sexual predator, and make him momentarily the one who’s being pursued by a teenage girl. In those moments, when Linda reaches out to kiss him on the neck, that kind of playing with those roles was interesting to me.

  Jill: Your language in the book throughout is extraordinary. I was having a hard time trying to figure out how to describe it. There's a precision to it. There's a very sharp and exact and specific metaphor. Then there's also a transcendence or a little bit of dreaminess or mystery behind the specifics.

  One example that I loved is when Linda was talking about summer. You write:

  You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there's always something wrong. Everywhere you look, insects thicken the air, birds rifle the trees, enormous, leaves drag the branches down. 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.

  How did you think about language in general in this book? That's a big question, I know.

  Fridlund: Let's see if I can answer that. I will say this. I probably think in terms of language — especially rhythm, the rhythm of sentences — more than anything else. That is what is primary and first for me as a writer.

  Often, people will ask, "Did you write an outline?" I don't do that because I'm often just following from a sentence, to the next sentence, to the next sentence, which is a difficult way to write. [Laughter]

  It's hard to explain. That's the thing about rhythm. There’s something about the way that sentences can provide a repetition, or a withholding of information, or a speeding up or a slowing down that is really, really essential to me. Often, I'm just following those rhythms in my ear and finding words to use, if that makes sense. It is very important to me.

  I'm so glad you asked about it, because I think a lot about character and themes and plot and feeling, but they're all mediated by the language. I’d get notes from editors, for instance, and I would think, Well, I can't do that because I can't change the sentence. The sentence is fixed. It's hard to explain, but the language was essential to me, and the sentences in particular, the ways that they work together.

  It's hard to tinker. It was hard to go back and do editing, honestly. Maybe all writers feel that way, and it's just one of those things.

  Jill: I think that very much comes through in the reading of the book. That's the first reason that I really loved it, was the language. Not that it's a separate thing from the rest of the book, as you were saying, but that caught me early on.

  Lastly, I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say that it shows the book through a slightly different lens than you might have been reading it before. I was wondering, how did you think about those last scenes, and how they would affect the overall experience of the book for the reader?

  Fridlund: That's a good question. How do I put this? The plot with Patra and the Gardners plays itself out, in a way. I finished that piece of the book, but it felt to me like there was some energy or some emotion that had not been dealt with yet. The last chapter, in a way, was just a means for me to try to get at that. Some piece of it had to do with anger.

  I think one of the difficulties of the book is the way that I put these two different plot lines together, with Mr. Grierson and Lily, and then the Gardner family. It was one of the things I wanted to think about as a writer, the way that two things that happen to us at the same time — two separate parts of our lives — can influence each other, even if they're not causally related, even if the characters from one plot line don't jump over into the other.

  Some of that residual pain that Linda is feeling at the end of the book after the Gardner family leaves, that residual anger, she can't do anything with it. It felt like it needed to be applied somewhere. And that's how I thought of the end of the book. She's taking those feelings that she had from one part of her life, and it transforms how she thinks about the other part of her life with Lily and Mr. Grierson.

  Also, a lot of the book is playing with the question of, how do you know who's prey, who's the aggressor, who's passive?

  It became a moment for me to have Linda actually do something, although almost in a way, it's also non-action. There had to be an outlet for that anger and that grief and that guilt that she felt. It was a way for there to be an outlet for me as a writer, too.
  ÷ ÷ ÷
  Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota and currently resides in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her fiction has appeared in a wide variety of journals. She holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and currently teaches at Cornell University. Fridlund's collection of stories, Catapult, was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award for Fiction and the Tartts First Fiction Award. It won the Mary McCarthy Prize and will be published by Sarabande in 2017. The opening chapter of History of Wolves was published in Southwest Review and won the 2013 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction.

• Cornell University - http://english.cornell.edu/emily-fridlund

  Emily Fridlund
  Post-doctoral Associate

  Rockefeller Hall, Room 435
  ejf97@cornell.edu

  Overview

  Emily Fridlund grew up in the Twin Cities and received her MFA in fiction from Washington University in Saint Louis. In 2014, she completed her PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her short fiction is forthcoming or has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Boston Review, Southwest Review, FiveChapters, New Orleans Review, Sou'wester, and The Portland Review, among other journals. Emily is currently revising her first novel, History of Wolves, which was supported by a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for feminist projects. Along with her novel, Emily's graduate research was a study of simultaneity in modernist and contemporary narrative called The Usual Things in Unusual Places.

  DEPARTMENTS/PROGRAMS

  English
  Research

  Craft of Fiction
  Twentieth-Century British and American Literature
  Women's Writing and Feminist Theory
  Narrative Theory

• American Booksellers Association - http://bookweb.org/news/emily-fridlund-%E2%80%9Chistory-wolves%E2%80%9D-january%E2%80%99s-1-indie-next-list-pick-35225

  Emily Fridlund on “History of Wolves,” January’s #1 Indie Next List Pick
  By Sydney Jarrard on Friday, Dec 16, 2016
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  Emily Fridlund, author of History of Wolves
  Photo by Doug Knutson
  Independent booksellers have named History of Wolves: A Novel by Emily Fridlund (Atlantic Monthly Press) the number-one Indie Next List pick for January. Fridlund’s debut was also chosen by booksellers for the Winter/Spring 2017 Indies Introduce program, and it was featured as an Editors’ Buzz Book at BookExpo America 2016. The first chapter of History of Wolves won the Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction Prize in 2013.

  “A lonely teenager in rural northern Minnesota, Linda is desperate for connection and obsessed with both her enigmatic new neighbors and a classmate entangled in a scandalous relationship with a teacher. Narrating these seemingly disparate story threads is the adult Linda, who may have been villain, victim, or bystander in at least one tragedy,” said Sharon Flesher of Brilliant Books in Traverse City, Michigan. “With lyrical prose and precise pacing, Fridlund builds tension and weaves a complex, multilayered morality tale rich in metaphor and symbolism. This haunting, meticulously crafted novel will inspire lengthy rumination on topics ranging from the meaning of its title to the power of belief.”

  Fridlund, who holds an MFA from Washington University and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California, has been published in the Boston Review, the New Orleans Review, and the Portland Review, among other publications. Her stories have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2015 Catapult, a collection of her short stories to be published next year by Sarabande Books, won the Mary McCarthy Prize.

  Booksellers will have the opportunity to meet Fridlund next month, when she will be appearing at the 2017 Winter Institute among more than 100 fellow authors and illustrators. Here, Fridlund discusses the inspiration for History of Wolves and what it means to have the support of indie booksellers for her debut novel.

  Jacket image for History of Wolves by Emily FridlundBookselling This Week: History of Wolves began as a short story. Why did you decide to expand it into a novel?

  Emily Fridlund: I initially wrote the first chapter as a short story that focused on Linda’s experiences at school and her relationship to her new teacher, Mr. Grierson. I wanted to think about issues related to desire and gender and power, and in particular what would happen if a sexual “predator” is himself pursued by an observant and lonely teenage girl. When I finished that story, I thought I was done with Linda and her austere northern Minnesota landscape. But I found there was something about Linda’s voice that stayed with me. Because of her age and inexperience, there is a certain distance between what the reader knows and what she does, a gap that creates tension in the narrative. At the same time, those very same qualities that make Linda naïve — her isolation, her loneliness and youth — also make her an incredibly acute and natural observer of the world around her. She’s paying fierce attention. Because she takes in all the details, she is often very good at reading people, even as she struggles, in her inexperience, to make sense of events as they unfold. I found this peculiar combination of canniness, ferocity, and ignorance compelling. I realized that lingering in Linda’s voice a little longer might allow me to explore other ideas that interested me related to perception, belief, and storytelling.

  BTW: The setting for History of Wolves — the bitter cold of northern Minnesota and the claustrophobic wilderness that Linda calls home — effectively becomes an additional character critical to the narrative. How did you prepare to write so extensively about Linda’s world?

  EF: From the beginning, I thought of Linda's emotional landscape and northern Minnesota as closely linked. The novel’s setting is based on a region of Minnesota I visited around the time the initial story expanded into a novel — somewhere west of Duluth, north of Brainerd — but it is also an invented place, based on Linda’s unusual way of seeing and being in the world. The setting of the novel was, perhaps first and foremost, a way for me to get at and reveal my characters, Linda in particular. In the earliest drafts, I drew freely from my own experiences. I was a kid who loved being outside, roaming the scrappy suburban woods in my backyard and camping with my family up north. I was also inspired by my reading, especially Minnesota nature writers like Sigurd Olson and Helen Hoover, and also Barry Lopez’s marvelous work on wolves. In later drafts I did more specific research into details like species and tools, but in the beginning so much of capturing Linda’s voice was about capturing how she felt living in her world. That meant thinking of the setting as atmosphere as much as a concrete place.

  BTW: As a main character, Linda is unusual: she is not particularly likable, she may be unreliable, her habits of watching people border on stalking, and she meticulously observes everything. How did you mold Linda as a character?

  EF: As a girl child raised at the end of the 20th century in the Midwest, I was trained to think a lot about likability, I admit. But as a reader and a writer it is not something that I think about much at all. I go to fiction for characters that are interesting, that make me think and feel in ways I haven’t thought and felt before. I knew I could expand the short story that began History of Wolves when I realized that I found Linda’s mode of being in the world interesting enough to engage me for the time it would take to write a book. One of the things that intrigued me most about Linda was her particular combination of canniness and innocence, which makes her powerful in some ways and helpless in others. She sees some things that the novel’s other characters fail to take in, and at the same time her inexperience and isolation make her blind to certain patterns that might otherwise seem obvious. I was also drawn to Linda as a narrator because, unlike me, she lives a very physically demanding life. She spends her days chopping wood and fishing and keeping the fire going at night, and because of this, she is a person who experiences the world through her body rather than through talk or conversation. It was a challenge for me as a writer to situate her emotional responses within physical sensations, to let the reader see how she feels through her interactions with her dogs and the woods. It is maybe this aspect of Linda’s character that makes the world around her seem a little charged.

  BTW: Family is a murky theme in History of Wolves, and Linda exhibits an urgent sense of needing to belong. When she becomes the governess for the Gardner family, she nearly achieves that, but she’s still stuck on the periphery. Why is the feeling of belonging so important to Linda?

  EF: Just before I wrote this novel I spent time reading some of the old great Gothic governess stories, books like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. What I love about these books is the curiously peripheral-yet-essential role the governess plays in family structures. Because of this littoral zone the governess occupies, these books are especially good at teasing out issues related to power and powerlessness, or to maintaining the status quo and rebelling against it. The contemporary equivalent of the governess is the babysitter, of course, and Linda’s role as babysitter to Paul in History of Wolves grants her privileged access to a family structure that she has been — because of her parents’ commune past — denied. She wants what the people who raised her have eschewed: a fixed and reliable family. But her sense of belonging as a babysitter in the Gardner family is extremely fragile and temporary, and it comes with little reward and at a high price.

  It’s worth saying, too, that I don’t think of this predicament as especially unique to Linda. Don’t most of us ache to belong somewhere? Part of what I wanted to explore in this book is how this desire makes us all capable of being complicit, of preserving the status quo as long as possible, especially when our little measures of short-term comfort and happiness are at stake.

  BTW: History of Wolves delves into the power of perception, the power of faith, and the power — or powerlessness — of hindsight within a complex and tense narrative. What inspired the idea for History of Wolves?

  EF: I’ve always been intrigued by the way perception shapes the stories we tell and the realities we act upon. In History of Wolves, I grew interested in setting the story of Linda’s history teacher, Mr. Grierson, next to the story of the Gardner family in order to think through the relationship of thought to action, and witness to responsibility. What seems to “count” — what we see, what we do, or what we think — shifts in different contexts, and I wanted to think through the complex and sometimes contradictory ways we hold people responsible for these various levels of involvement in events as they unfold. I have also always been fascinated by the way time affects stories as they are told. History of Wolves is a coming-of-age story told in retrospect: the first half of the book is a little closer to Linda as a teenager, while the second section pans out more, aligning the reader more closely with Linda as an adult. Through this structure, I hoped that the reader might experience something of the way hindsight reorders and reinterprets what we see, changing how events add up and ultimately what they mean.

  BTW: How does it feel to have such strong support for your debut from independent booksellers? What can indie booksellers expect from you next?

  EF: It’s very humbling and moving, especially because I know what a labor of love sustaining an independent bookstore is. It means so much to me to have the support of people who have devoted their lives to books, to finding ways of spreading stories and ideas in the world! It’s such important work. As for the next project, I am now revising a collection of stories called Catapult that will be coming out with Sarabande in October of 2017. And there is perhaps another novel idea waiting for my attention when those revisions are complete, but it’s still pretty embryonic.

History of Wolves
Arlene McKanic
BookPage. (Jan. 2017): p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
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Full Text:
HISTORY OF WOLVES

By Emily Fridlund

Atlantic Monthly

$25, 288 pages

ISBN 9780802125873

eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Like many coming-of-age stories, History of Wolves features a grown-up narrator looking back on an event in her teenage years that forever changed her belief in the way the world works. The brilliance of this novel is that the events that ruined Madeline, aka "Linda," are so appalling that they may change the way the reader believes the world works as well.

The story opens in the middle of a typically punishing Minnesota winter; the superbly talented Fridlund makes you feel the cold in your joints and imagine the sound of a knock on the crust of ice over a snowdrift. Linda lives with her hippie parents in such poverty that they not only lack central heating but a door: Only a tarp stands between them and the cold.

Then a new family moves into a new house across the lake from Linda: Leo and Patra Gardner and their little boy, Paul. Linda is taken on as Paul's babysitter. To the perceptive Linda, they are just a shade off normal, which entices her because she's just a shade off normal herself. But soon the reader, with a skin-crawling dread worthy of any decent slasher movie, begins to realize that something's more than just not right. You only hope that it's not what you think it is.

But learning that it's not what you think it is brings no relief, because what is really going on is ever so much worse. When what happens happens, you want to stop and go back to the beginning of the book to search for the clues you knew had to be there. You'll find them.

Fridlund earns a place as a topnotch writer with this remarkable, disturbing debut.

Fridlund, Emily. History of Wolves
Leslie Patterson
Library Journal. 141.18 (Nov. 1, 2016): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Fridlund, Emily. History of Wolves. Atlantic Monthly. Jan. 2017. 288p. ISBN 9780802125873. $25; ebk. ISBN 9780802189776. F

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

Fridlund, Emily: HISTORY OF WOLVES
Kirkus Reviews. (Oct. 15, 2016):
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Fridlund, Emily HISTORY OF WOLVES Atlantic Monthly (Adult Fiction) $25.99 1, 3 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2587-3

An atmospheric, near-gothic coming-of-age novel turns on the dance between predator and prey.Fridlund's debut won the McGinnis-Ritchie Award in 2013 for its first chapter. It's a 17-page stunner that begins with a child ghost and ends in a chorus of communal condemnation. The novel itself unfurls in far northern Minnesota, where a 14-year-old named Mattie Furston, who calls herself Linda, is living on a failed commune with her parents. She's hungry in flesh and spirit, a backwoods outcast among "hockey players in their yellowed caps...cheerleaders with their static-charged bangs." She chops wood and cleans fish with her father, who was "kind to objects. With people he was a little afraid." When a young woman moves with her 4-year-old son into a new cabin across the lake, the teenage Linda, who's looking back on these events as an adult, is hired to babysit. Fridlund is an assured writer: she knows how water tuts against a boat hull and how mosquitoes descend into any patch of shade. Her sense of cold freezes the reader: "Beneath a foot of ice, beneath my boots, the walleye drifted. They did not try to swim, or do anything that required effort. They hovered, waiting winter out with driftwood, barely beating their hearts." As dread coils around Linda, the novel gives up its secrets slowly. One concerns an eighth-grade teacher accused of owning child porn; another is tangled in the newcomer family's Christian Science. Fridlund circles these threads around each other in tightening, mesmerizing loops. The novel has a tinge of fairy tale, wavering on the blur between good and evil, thought and action. But the sharp consequences for its characters make it singe and sing--a literary tour de force. Four years after its initial prize, this slender work is worth the wait.

History of Wolves
Publishers Weekly. 263.40 (Oct. 3, 2016): p96.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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* History of Wolves

Emily Fridlund. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2587-3

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In Fridlund's stellar debut novel, 14-year-old Linda, an observant loner growing up in the Minnesota woods, becomes intrigued with the Gardners, the young family that moves in across the lake from her home. As she gets to know them, she realizes that something is amiss. Having been raised in a commune by unconventional parents, Linda is prone to provocative statements and challenging authority. She's also fascinated by the scandal that occurs when Lily Holburn, a student at her school, accuses a teacher, Adam Grierson, of inappropriate behavior but then recants her testimony. At the same time, Linda forges a friendship with the comparatively worldly Patra Gardner and her endearing four-year-old, Paul, whom Linda babysits for a summer before his sudden and mysterious death. Matters take a curious turn once Patra's husband, an older man named Leo, returns after months away at work. Fridlund expertly laces Linda's possessive protectiveness for Patra with something darker, bordering on romantic jealousy. A sense of foreboding subtly permeates the story as Fridlund slowly reveals what happened to Paul. Her wordsmithing is fantastic, rife with vivid turns of phrase. Fridlund has elegantly crafted a striking protagonist whose dark leanings cap off the tragedy at the heart of this book, which is moving and disturbing, and which will stay with the reader. Agent'. Nicole Aragi, Aragilnc. (Jan.)

A Teenage Witness to Backwoods Intrigue
Jennifer Senior
The New York Times. (Jan. 5, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC6(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
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There's a certain species of psychological thriller that starts with a kidnapping -- not as a literal plot point, but as a metaphorical assault on the person who's pulled it from the shelf. The reader is stuffed in a burlap bag, shoved in a trunk and driven around with little sense of where the car's headed or who the driver is; it's up to the author to provide contours, bearings and ultimately a little light.

In her fiction debut, ''History of Wolves,'' Emily Fridlund takes precisely this guerrilla approach. Her narrator, Linda, may be a bit perverse and amoral; or she may be just your averagely narcissistic teenager, prone to casual brutality and blind to the hardships and hurts of those around her. We know that she babysits a 4-year-old boy, Paul, who occasionally speaks in trancelike sentences about God. We know that she often lacks patience with him. And we know from the very beginning (Paragraph 2, to be precise) that Paul dies. What we don't know is how. Or why. Just that there's a trial.

Crudely speaking, ''History of Wolves'' is about a transformative, deeply damaging year in an adolescent's life. But Linda is no ordinary adolescent. She's more like a child from a fairy tale or a young adult novel: solitary, unsupervised, left to survive by her wits in the Minnesota woods. She lives on an abandoned commune in a bleak, drafty cabin. She's not even certain if the people she calls her parents are really hers -- they may simply be the ones who stayed behind when the hippies disbanded.

When Paul and his young mother, Patra, move into the house across the lake, Linda is drawn to them, as they are to her. Each party is lonely. Linda has no friends to speak of (the kids call her ''commie'' and ''freak'') and no true sense of family; Patra's husband is in Hawaii, and the philosophical distance separating husband and wife may possibly be greater still.

Linda starts babysitting Paul. Nurturing does not come easily to her.

''You're supposed to be out cold,'' she scolds him one evening, when he protests that she's left his room too soon after putting him to bed.

''You're supposed to be nice to me!'' he says.

''You're supposed to be sweet and cute,'' she whispers back. ''You're supposed to be a lovable little boy. You're supposed to be lots of things you're not always.''

Then Patra's husband shows up. Things unravel in a grim, ugly hurry. The reader understands what's going on before Linda does. It takes her awhile to realize she's been the passive witness to something dreadful, and it takes her even longer to process it. Inaction can be scarring, its own form of moral injury. At 37, the age at which Linda finally tells this story, she is still a marginal figure, a ghost, a woman with little more than ''a car payment, a P.O. box.''

Yet here is the danger in withholding crucial information from your readers for so long: Eventually they expect their uncertainty to be rewarded, preferably with interest. This does not happen in ''History of Wolves,'' as promisingly as it starts out. I sensed where Ms. Fridlund was heading before she started dropping explicit clues, and even if I hadn't, I suspect I'd have been underwhelmed. Those thunderheads massing on the horizon let loose only a weak drizzle.

A shame, this is: Ms. Fridlund's voice is unusual, and she knows how to create a moody, slate-gray sense of place. The hardened locals of her Northern Minnesota spend the winter entombed in Polartecs and mukluks. At school, ''a late-season storm brought a huge poplar branch down in a wumff of ice.'' The cold of the landscape seeps into the author's prose. Ms. Fridlund writes with iron detachment. ''I was flat-chested, plain as a bannister,'' Linda says of herself. ''I made people feel judged.''

Ms. Fridlund's novel arrives in a bundle of ribbons and bells. It has had pride of place at buzz-building publishing conferences; the first chapter won a literary prize from The Southwest Review.

But the subject of that chapter -- the pandemonium of our sexual yearnings -- and the characters it introduces (Mr. Grierson, a history teacher ultimately accused of pedophilia, and Lily, the luscious high school beauty with whom he's accused of having inappropriate relations) fade fairly quickly from view, resurfacing only periodically. I missed them. They were provocative, startling. Only as the book winds down do they reappear, but it's disorienting, strained. It turns out that there's a parallel between Patra's story and Mr. Grierson's. Both of them have to suppress their most primal urges and thoughts; one is punished by the state for it, the other is not. But Ms. Fridlund has to guide her readers to these realizations on a leash.

''History of Wolves'' contains the kernels of many possible novels, with lots of larger ideas to plumb: how all children become hostages to their parents' dogma in some way; how strange it is that we should implicitly trust people we don't know well; how family is and is not defined by flesh and blood. ''It's not what you think but what you do that matters,'' Linda says at one point, summing up one of the book's central moral lessons. Ms. Fridlund might take this advice to heart, though in a slightly different way. All the ideas in the world can't make a great novel. It's what you do with them that matters.

History of WolvesBy Emily Fridlund275 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $25.

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PHOTOS: Emily Fridlund, the author of the novel ''History of Wolves,'' which is her first. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG KNUTSON)

McKanic, Arlene. "History of Wolves." BookPage, Jan. 2017, p. 19. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225431&it=r&asid=6c43c50f439314c13f4d3d494b3c34dd. Accessed 11 June 2017. Patterson, Leslie. "Fridlund, Emily. History of Wolves." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467830336&it=r&asid=c161fd05d9d07af50eb295e5981a8cbd. Accessed 11 June 2017. "Fridlund, Emily: HISTORY OF WOLVES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329192&it=r&asid=492e97e72a6ba049a6c64528e250bae1. Accessed 11 June 2017. "History of Wolves." Publishers Weekly, 3 Oct. 2016, p. 96. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466166564&it=r&asid=5e2fa96cbba02c2998d665700820b3ec. Accessed 11 June 2017. Senior, Jennifer. "A Teenage Witness to Backwoods Intrigue." New York Times, 5 Jan. 2017, p. C6(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476480859&it=r&asid=88cf6ddd3ac42a4b450f844c3cd55276. Accessed 11 June 2017.

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2017/01/03/507162378/beautiful-icy-history-of-wolves-transcends-genre
  Word count: 811

  Beautiful, Icy 'History Of Wolves' Transcends Genre

  January 3, 20177:00 AM ET
  MICHAEL SCHAUB
  History of Wolves
  History of Wolves
  by Emily Fridlund

  Hardcover, 279 pages purchase

  There's a reason that some readers view contemporary coming-of-age novels with suspicion. Too many play out the same way: An odd but winsome young person goes on some kind of journey of discovery, either literal or figurative, and learns something about himself or herself in the process. Often, there's an awkward romance. And the ending, whether happy or otherwise, can usually be described as bittersweet.

  There are exceptions, of course, and Emily Fridlund's electrifying debut novel History of Wolves is one of them. The book doesn't follow the now-familiar narrative arc that other novels in the genre do. There's no moment of revelation at the end; if anything, the protagonist ends up more confused than she was at the beginning. Fridlund refuses to obey the conventions that her sometimes hidebound colleagues do, and her novel is so much the better for it.

  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." The unkind nicknames are the result of her upbringing on a northern Minnesota commune, long since abandoned by all of its idealistic residents, with the exception of her parents. To them, Linda is something of an enigma, overly serious, lacking the heedless playfulness of other children. "[My mother] wanted very badly for me to cavort and pretend, to prove I was unharmed, happy," Linda muses, but she finds herself unable to participate in the ruse.

  Linda's year is changed by the arrival of a new history teacher, Mr. Grierson, the kind of adult desperate to be seen as cool by his adolescent charges. Linda makes a passing attempt to seduce him; later, he's arrested and accused of possessing child pornography and having sex with one of his students.

  'History of Wolves' isn't a typical thriller any more than it's a typical coming-of-age novel
  Michael Schaub
  When a new family moves across the lake from the mostly abandoned commune, Linda sees a chance to distract herself from her unhappy home and school life. She develops a quick affection for Patra, a young woman who works editing her astronomer husband's manuscripts, and their four-year-old boy, Paul. The couple hires Linda to babysit Paul during the summer days.

  Linda doesn't know quite what to make of Paul, or of children in general. "By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks," she thinks. "They believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that's what you wanted — pretenders who didn't know they were pretending at all."

  Patra, Paul and Linda grow close, although Linda harbors misgivings about Leo, the quiet and mysterious father of the boy. It doesn't take long for Linda's doubts to be confirmed, when something terrible happens — it's out of the blue, and it leaves both Linda and the reader in shock.

  History of Wolves isn't a typical thriller any more than it's a typical coming-of-age novel; Fridlund does a remarkable job transcending genres without sacrificing the suspense that builds steadily in the book. She's particularly effective using descriptions of nature to provide eerie foreshadowing: "You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there's always something wrong. ... The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters."

  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.

  "Maybe there is a way to climb above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things," an adult Linda reflects. "But isn't that the crux of the problem? Wouldn't we all act differently if we were someone else?"

  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. History of Wolves is as beautiful and as icy as the Minnesota woods where it's set, and with her first book, Fridlund has already proven herself to be a singular talent.

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/16/history-of-wolves-emily-fridlund-review
  Word count: 752

  History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund review – God and grooming
  A teenager struggles to come of age in a world of religious zealots and predatory teachers in this stark debut
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  Sarah Ditum
  Thursday 16 February 2017 10.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.26 EDT

  The coming-of-age novel can be almost as painful as actually coming of age. It’s a genre that demands a tricky combination of narrative knowingness and character naivety, while recruiting the reader’s sympathies for one of God’s least sympathetic creations: the teenager. Even so, many novelists choose it for their debut, and last year offered two examples that exemplified both the successes and frustrations of the form. Emma Cline’s The Girls was a woozy hormonal fug that found the horror in the thrill of growing up; Tiffany McDaniels’ The Summer that Melted Everything smothered its story’s gothic potential in stentorian hindsight.

  Emily Fridlund’s debut falls between the two. Teenage narrator Linda gets called “commie” and “freak” by her schoolmates, and it’s small wonder that she doesn’t fit in when her background has precision-tooled her for oddness. Raised by parents who are the last vestiges of a failed cult, she lives a semi-wilderness life in a cabin at the edge of a lake, on the fringe of a northern Minnesota forest. Uncomfortable in the world, she spreads discomfort about her: “I was flat-chested, plain as a bannister. I made people feel judged.”

  Meditation on power … Emily Fridlund
  Meditation on power … Emily Fridlund
  Life offers her two simultaneous chances to fit in, although both – as we know from the start – go terribly wrong. Firstly, there’s Mr Grierson, a new teacher who encourages Linda to enter the “History Odyssey” inter-school competition. Linda gives a presentation on the history of wolves, from which the novel takes its name. There is no such thing as a true “alpha wolf”, she tells her audience (and the reader): instead, “an alpha animal may only be alpha at certain times for a specific reason”. Linda memorises those lines like “an amendment to the constitution”. What they teach her about power changes her life, and directs the story of the novel.

  Secondly, there’s four-year-old Paul, who along with his mother Patra moves into the cabin across the water from Linda. Linda’s background means she’s only really seen how to be a kid from the outside: “I remembered children from the playground where I’d watched them when I was growing up. Plus, I’d read some books with children in them,” she says. Paul is her chance to belong to a real family, to learn to be normal. Unfortunately, Paul is not normal. His parents are deeply involved in Christian Science and Paul himself is, we learn on page four, doomed.

  This should be a recipe for morbid curiosity. But when everything is explicitly foreshadowed, nothing is at stake
  Mr Grierson is not much better off. His concern for his pupils is not limited to innocent encouragement, and his fall is flagged soon after his introduction. God and grooming, child death and grotty sex, blame and betrayal – this should be a recipe for morbid curiosity. But when everything is explicitly foreshadowed, nothing is at stake. Fridlund carries on meticulously dressing her traps long after they’ve been sprung. In some ways, this is the standard literary fiction shortcoming of thinking plot is the least important part. In others, Fridlund’s weaknesses are her own.

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  Characters tend to be vague outlines with tics. Leo tucks his shirt in a lot; Linda’s mother baptises her obsessively. But there are none of the subtle mechanisms that make characters coherent – and capable of acting surprisingly. There is only one mood: slow and sad. A good teenage novel needs some riot with its woe (The Bell Jar, for example, is enormously funny, as well as being a book about suicide). Having given up the plot goods early, Fridlund’s hold on the reader slips too. For a novel that aspires to say something about about power, History of Wolves is strikingly impotent.

  • To order History of Wolves for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-history-of-wolves-20170105-story.html
  Word count: 1100

  Emily Fridlund's debut novel 'History of Wolves' is chilling, in a good way
  Emily Fridlund
  Emily Fridlund, author of "History of Wolves." (Doug Knutson)
  Paula Woods
  Madeline Furston, first-person narrator of Emily Fridlund’s debut novel, “History of Wolves,” is hard to know. She’s called Linda at her middle school, but also Commie or Freak. She’s an only child, wears hand-me-downs from neighbors and lives in a cabin whose electricity comes from a generator, her family the last inhabitants of a long-abandoned commune at the top of a steep, dark hill in the fictional town of Loose River in Northern Minnesota. At 14, Linda is both lonely and a keen observer of her natural world. “Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt down, exhausted, and stayed.” Linda watches teachers and her fellow students too, but without understanding the motivations that fuel their actions or sometimes her own.

  She is drawn to Mr. Grierson, a substitute history teacher, who himself pays a lot of attention to the cheerleaders and especially Lily Holburn, she of the sleek black hair and sheer sweaters. Linda observes how Lily’s nascent sexuality affects Mr. Grierson, but it stirs something in her too. “Without saying a word, Lily could make people feel encouraged, blessed. She had dimples on her cheeks, nipples that flashed like signs from God through her sweater. I was flat chested, plain as a banister. I made people feel judged.” So when Linda impulsively kisses Mr. Grierson in his car after her presentation on wolves at a local history competition, the reader both can empathize with her jealous competitiveness with Lily and fear the consequences. When Grierson is later discovered to be a pedophile on the run from a school in California, and Lily accuses him of molestation, the reader’s suspicions are confirmed even if Linda feels deceived: “I felt … that he’d lied to me, profoundly, by ignoring what I did to him in his car, pretending to be better than he was.”

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  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. When a family moves into their new house across the lake the winter Linda is 15, she knows them, having spied on the parents the previous summer with their young child “like attendants to a very small bride, doting, hovering.” Linda scorns then pities them for their folly, their inept navigation of a universe of snow. But later that winter, after the father mysteriously disappears, Linda encounters and befriends Patra Gardner, the young mother only 11 years older than Linda, and her son, Paul.

  From the book’s opening scene, the reader knows Paul’s importance to Linda, who often experiences the boy through physical contact, the casual, overwhelming intimacy of a yawning 4-year-old leaning against her chest. But is it more than that? The author’s deft use of foreshadowing hints at some impending tragedy over the horizon as Linda becomes Paul’s babysitter, or as Patra declares one day, “governess.” The very term evokes repressed feelings and dark mysteries, associations with Gothic romances like Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” or Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” which Patra and many readers will know but Linda does not.

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  Like the governesses in those stories, Linda is both a part of the family but separate from it. From this vantage point, Linda begins to crave an intoxicating kind of intimacy with the Gardners quite unlike her own family, one in which Linda is more the adult in the room than her mother — who’s always surprised when the evening’s darkness descends on her quilting, or her father, a taciturn man whose major connection to the world seems to be through things, not people.

  But the Gardners aren’t picture perfect either, and the tension between what Linda hopes to have with them and the facts as they emerge is expertly handled by Fridlund, who builds a palpable sense of dread through flashbacks and foreshadowing, all at 11-year intervals, not coincidentally the gap in years between Paul, Linda, Patra and husband Leo. While the novel is anchored in the voice of the nature-obsessed Linda at 15, exploring the woods with Paul or trying to understand Lily Holburn’s magnetic appeal and her treachery, the reader gets glimpses in the second half of Linda at 26, living in Duluth with a boyfriend and a growing sense of regret. At another point in the novel she’s 4, plotting with another child to break away from the commune’s physical boundaries, and later still, at 37, she’s trying to make sense of what happened to Paul and her complicity in sealing his fate.

  In the process, Fridlund makes a wolfish detective of the reader, devouring pages for the meaning in a child’s fruity breath, Linda’s later contact with Mr. Grierson, her fascination with Lily Holburn, her instinct to protect her happy family with Patra and Paul, especially when Leo Gardner re-joins the family in the spring. An astronomer who’s been away in Hawaii writing a book, Leo’s return imposes his mental superiority, his opinions and his faith on Linda and his family, including his insistence that his child is fine, a “perfect child of God,” which has disastrous consequences that reverberate throughout the novel.

  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.

  Paula L. Woods, author of four novels and several anthologies, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

  "History of Wolves" by Emily Fridlund
  "History of Wolves" by Emily Fridlund (Atlantic Monthly Press)
  “History of Wolves”

  By Emily Fridlund

  Atlantic Monthly Press: 288 pp., $25

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