I haven't been able to complete this as it features the death of a child. Since having children, reading about the deaths of children makes me feel dizzy and need to lie down. Many apologies as I think this does sound like it was an interesting book.

A genuinely captivating read. It reminded me a little of Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro. There's a dreamlike sense of looking back on past life, and the inevitability of tragedy, tempered by the knowledge that everything will be okay - well, more or less - in the end. I didn't really get the title. Everything to do with wolves felt a bit shoe-horned in, with no particular connection to the place, or the girl. But still, a book definitely worth reading.

I enjoyed the first 75% of this book but felt that the last part and the conclusion was a let down. I don’t feel that I have had a satisfactory ending to the story. The whole thing with Lily is very confusing and not very relevant to the story with the Gardners.

This book was not at all what I was expecting, which threw me a little, and I am not sure who it is really aimed at as there are a lot of young adult themes. However, it is a beautifully written coming of age story and a very enjoyable read overall.

I discovered this title due to its Booker nomination and I can see why it was shortlisted. A female protagonist embroiled in an off-kilter coming-of-age story. It was beautifully written with the description of the landscape particularly evocative. The religious and moral aspects make this an interesting book for discussion so would go down a storm with reading groups, although I think some of this was lost on me. A solid 4 stars for an accomplished debut.

This was an almost book for me. The basic premise was good but on every level it just failed to fully engage me, and therefore whilst I could admire the writing, I just kept thinking - why arent I getting more from this, why don't I care.

14 year old Linda lives in an ex-commune out in the woods. Lonely, socially-inexperienced and left to her own devices by her parents, Linda craves friends and a sense of belonging. When a new family moves nearby, she befriends the young mother and regularly babysits the four year old child. But she soon discovers that all is not right. The choices Linda has to make to keep her new found family could have tragic consequences. Compelling reading.

This is a beautifully written novel with a lovey sense of place and of the narrator, a young woman. The novel explores what it means to be a parent, a responsible adult and a vulnerable child. There is an interesting exploration of the nature of faith or more general beliefs and how they impact upon an individuals actions and interpretations of different situations.

Well worth reading

Debut novel from Emily Fridlund which has all ready been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Seen from the perspective of Linda, the 14 year old protagonist of the novel, she immediately discloses snippets of information which suggest that things are not what they seem. Living in an isolated community, Linda is given freedom to do as she pleases by her parents, and when a family move in across the lake Linda finds herself drawn to the young mother Patra and her young son Paul. Through the eyes of Linda both as a girl and a woman we observe the people she comes in contact with.

A dark, poetic novel , however it is hard to connect with the characters as they are often vague, ghostly figures. I can see this working for young adult readers.

Maybe a little too much iron in the fire. I understand that it is possible that a young girl grows up in a family that is the wreck of a hippie commune, who finds herself having a teacher accused of pedophilia and is babysitting for a family of fundamentalist Christians who let their son die as they are convinced of the resurrection's power of prayer, or rather, I understand that it is possible in America: after all it was possile for Americans to elect Donald Trump as President of the United States, but from a narrative point of view the reader is served with a slightly stodgy meal .
Continued jumps back and forth over time and narrative situations don't help keep straight the history boat and the wolves of the title are basically just a pretext, which should be a guideline, but which are, in the end, only a matter of further weighting .
I thank Orion Publishing Group and Netgalley for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Fridlund’s novel is set in a small rural town on the shore of a lake in Minnesota. Madeline, or Linda as she’s most commonly known, is the only remaining child of a failed hippie commune. She’s a mystery to the other children she goes to school with, and her lack of companionship shows itself in how she interacts with people. She lets them assume she knows what they’re talking about until she’s gleaned enough information to actually know. This trait is one of the reasons that the action of the novel falls out the way it does.

This is a coming of age novel but it’s not just about Linda and her working her way through her teenage years. It’s also about the limits of religious freedoms and how far one person can interfere in the life of another family. Linda becomes the babysitter – renamed governess – to Paul, the young son of Patra and Leo, city people who have had a house built on the shores of the lake. And in the long summer she becomes entrenched into the lives of Patra and Paul – Leo having yet to return from the city. She teaches Paul about survival in the wilderness, how to gather dew on your coat sleeves, how to escape a bear and what to do when there are wolves around. But ultimately she can’t save him from death.

Paul’s death is revealed to the reader in the opening pages of the book; the rest is a slow creep of horror as you try to work out how he’s going to die and why. Is it going to be the freezing oppression of the Minnesota winter or an accident on the lake in summer? Fridlund has a beautiful eye and ear for the subtleties of weather and landscape and the particular harshness of rural communities.

The story of that summer is told by an adult Linda, escaped to the Twin Cities and trying to work out how to be a grown up, to cope with the events of her past, and even if she isn’t aware of how closely tied to the shore of that Minnesotan lake, other characters are. She might not be there but her thoughts are; they’re with that winter and with all the surrounding events.

The ending of the novel doesn’t quite pay off the promise of the rest of it, but it doesn’t ruin what is a beautiful book to read. In some ways the fizzle out is the perfect ending for this novel because there can be no neat and tidy ending for Linda and her past.

This could be described as a coming of age novel, narrated by a 14 year old girl living in a remote cabin in the great lakes area with her ex-commune parents. The sense of place is palpable, where children canoe as well as they cycle, snowbound in winter and stifling heat with mosquitoes in summer.
Over the course of the summer she grows close to a young mother and her 4 year old son for whom she babysits. We see how the events of that summer shape her future, as much as the past of her parents and her early life also shape her.
The novel perhaps promises more than it delivers but nonetheless I really enjoyed it.

An interesting read. I have read several recently that follow this slow release of information through a first person narrator in what feels a sometimes languid pace. Some of the memory shifts felt a little clumsy at times. I am surprised it made the long list for Booker. Worth a read but not one I would be rushing to recommend.

History of Wolves tries so hard to be a work of literary genius - I mean, it really, really tries. We have non-linear timelines blending more than one story; we have ambiguous words and gestures; we have teen angst blended with mature reflection; there's prolepsis aplenty. And there are woods and dogs. And dogs and woods. And a stuffed wolf.

For the first wee while, it is actually pretty readable. Madeline (Linda) is a rather awkward student at a Minnesota high school, taking some delight in irritating her fellow students and teachers. She appears to have a love-hate relationship with Lily, whose family seem to live in even greater poverty and weirdness than Linda's own family, and her delight when Lily's clandestine relationship with Mr Grierson, one of the teachers, is exposed. Meanwhile, Linda pre-occupies herself with worming her way into the lives of Patra and Paul, her four year old son, when they come to live in the house across the lake. The story mentions a trial to come, and it is all jolly intriguing.

But by half way, when a dramatic incident throws things into turmoil, the book unravels. The present day story, which is substantially less interesting and had previously just been an occasional reference in the background, starts to become more prominent. The references back and forth are choppy, and once we know about the dramatic turning point, the story is more or less done. Sure, there are still occasional details to emerge, but mostly these have already been inferred by the reader. Instead, there's lots of dull Duluth and some impenetrable back and forth trying to bring the two story lines together. By the end, there is much confusion, a sense that there are big symbols if only the reader had the patience to work them out, and an eager eye on the number of pages to go until the end.

If I am looking for the positives, I would say it conveys a good sense of Minnesota and, after Fargo, it is probably the second greatest artistic work I have encountered that has been set in Minnesota.

I was looking forward to reading A History of Wolves when I requested it but I have to say I was disappointed.
The writing style was beautifully descriptive and from that point of view it was a joy to read but I frequently found myself becoming bored. I only made it to 50% and I struggled to even get that far into it.
Originally, I was going to say I disliked the characters in the book but that isn’t true. The truth is I didn’t care about them at all, I didn’t have an opinion either way.
Linda is 14 years old and has grown up with her parents in a cabin in an abandoned commune with her ‘parents.’ Linda is unsure if they are her real parents or just the last two adults to stick around.
She doesn’t have a particularly close relationship with her mother but spend some quality time with her dad doing chores.
At school Linda is commonly referred to as ‘Commie’ or ‘freak’ and has nobody she is particularly close to. She is an average student at best.
One thing Linda has a particular talent for is wilderness survival skills and for observing nature.
In the book she has two obsessions 1. A teacher of hers being accused of possessing child pornography and his relationship with one of her schoolmates, Lily. 2. A seemingly normal family who move in to a cabin across the lake.
The husband works away a lot but Linda soon makes friends with Petra and her son Paul. Linda looks after Paul for $10 a day for a few hours after school. She feels a connection with this family that she clearly doesn’t feel with her own family.
I felt like nothing happened in the book and the things that did happen were underwhelming to say the least.
We know from the beginning that Paul dies, “before Paul, I’d known just one person who’d gone from living to dead.”
Linda becomes embroiled with the fate of the family and the effects of this are long-lasting. “At the trial, they kept asking, ‘When did you know for sure there was something wrong?’ And the answer probably was, right away. But that feeling faded as I got to know him. Paul’s breathy way of talking, the way he had to sit down when he got excited – these tendencies seemed to me, more and more, just the way he was.”
This was one of the few books I have chosen not to finish reading, it just wasn’t for me.

History of Wolves is another coming-of-age story that will resonate with many people. Linda, mostly left to raise herself by hippy, laid-back parents, lives in Northern Minnesota, on grounds that used to belong to a commune, of which her parents were members.

"Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt down, exhausted, and stayed."

Linda is fourteen, melodramatic, poetic. She's somewhat obsessed with a classmate, Lily, who spread rumours that their teacher, Mr Grierson, took her off and molested her. Linda's narrative often veers off into dark corners, and the way the story is told (bouncing back and forth, from teenage Linda to older Linda, reminiscing) only serves to increase the feeling of unease as the reader continues through the story.

Linda also spends a lot of time babysitting Paul, a toddler who moved into a cabin across the lake with his mother, Patra. Paul's father, Leo, is often working away, but when he arrives, Linda's relationship with Patra becomes strained. Patra is young, closer to Linda's age than to what Linda might consider a parent, and her youth becomes glaringly obvious when her older husband appears. You know that something happens, something bad, but Fridlund trickles the information into your mind, keeping you hooked until the very last page.

I did want to know more about the commune. Perhaps Fridlund will consider writing a prequel to History of Wolves. If so, I'd love to read it. The crisp writing reminded me of books like Winter's Bone and Eileen. Dark, wintry, honest. Fridlund is an extraordinary writer, and History of Wolves is a haunting debut.

There is something oppressive in the atmosphere of this book, like I imagine it would feel like walking in the Minnesota woods, where the story takes place, during winter. But here, trees and snow are replaced with a heavy need to be loved, the terrible things hidden between the image of a perfect family and the looming threat of a tragedy waiting to happen.

Linda tells us her story in retrospect, like in Emma Cline's The Girls, and we know from the start that something bad happens to Paul, the 4-year-old Linda babysat for several months when she was 14. The question is not so much what happened (he went from living to dead, she tells us on page 4), but how it happened. How the people around him let it happen, Linda included. The story raise many interesting questions about responsibility and complicity, about how it is easy to take the wrong decision - or to take no decision at all when one is required - when being loved and wanted becomes a desperate need.

In the end, the book stays open for interpretation, which didn't work so well for me but gives it the kind of random, unclosed business feel that life can get sometimes. It's still definitely a 4-star read in my book.

Looking back on the year when she was a lonely 14 year old called Linda, also Mattie or Madeline, this is a somewhat opaque story told in a first person narrative that swirls together issues of isolation and belonging (the lone wolf and the wolf pack in the symbolism of the title), of sex and knowledge, and of a slightly left-field introduction of negligence through religious belief.

From the beginning, there's an air of offness in Linda's voice and her view of the world: her prurient interest in a teacher and an attractive young pupil, for example. And when she gets involved with her new neighbours Leo, Patra and their young son Paul, there's a subtle air of menace in the narrative. The danger, though, when it comes, is from an unexpected direction...

Fridlund has lots of interesting ideas in this book but they don't weave together organically and feel placed through authorial will rather than developing naturally. We keep thinking we're in one kind of a story and then suddenly we're in another - and not in a good way. With the obligatory flashbacks and flashforwards, plus the use of dreams to reveal inner states, I found this all a bit chaotic in narrative terms.

The start of the story is so taut and fresh and gripping that I had high hopes of this book but it diverges off into too many different directions to be ultimately satisfying. All the same, Fridlund is an author to watch - if she, or a strong editor, can get her next book under tighter control.

To be posted on Amazon and Goodreads