HISTORY OF WOLVES by EMILY FRIDLUND (2017)

In the usual coming-of-age novel, the grown-up emerges as wiser and more self-aware as a result of youthful experiences. That's not true of this one. The narrator, writing as a 37-year-old woman, is as broken and lonely as she was when she was 15, when the main action takes place. The tone is one of almost Gothic doom. We know not to expect a happily-ever-after ending.

Madeline, more usually called Linda (or Commie or Freak by schoolmates), lives in an isolated cabin with a couple who may or may not be her real parents, the only remnants of a failed commune. Her parents are distant and her schoolmates torment her. The one teacher who seems to like her turns out to be a pedophile, and even he rejects her advances. When a young mother and her 4-year-old son move across the lake and she is hired to be a part-time babysitter, she finally feels that she has found a place for herself in a family. But then the father of the family arrives, and it becomes increasingly apparent that something dark is going on behind the cheerful family facade.

Fridlund shows herself to be particularly adept in her vivid descriptions of the Minnesota landscape, which reflects the coldness and bleakness of her narrator's life. Linda appears to equate herself with the wolves, who she says, "have nothing at all to do with humans, actually. If they can help it, they avoid them." After her experiences as a child and teenager, that is exactly the way she chooses to live her life.

I have only one quarrel with this fascinating and well-done novel. We know from the very beginning that a little boy named Paul dies. We have to wait until almost the end to find out how and why. Unfortunately, so much tension has been built up by the time the secrets are revealed that the answers are rather anti-climactic.

I highly recommend this book. It was short-listed for England's Booker Prize.