HISTORY OF WOLVES by Emily Fridlund

Fourteen-year-old Linda and her parents are the only remaining vestiges of a hippie commune in an isolated area of backwoods Minnesota.  Her world changes when she meets Patra Gardner, young mother of four-year-old Paul, whose death the author mentions early in the book.  Not until we meet Patra’s astronomer husband Leo do we discover that the couple are Christian Scientists.  Linda is their frequent babysitter, and it’s obvious that Patra desperately seeks the approval of her husband, perhaps at the expense of her son’s well-being.  This is an eerie, haunting book, not just because we know Paul is going to die and we want to know how, but also because the landscape is so cold, natural, and uninhabited.  Linda is an expert at splitting wood and skinning fish, and she’s good with Paul, but she’s not socially mature, although she does attend school and develops a particular rapport with a history teacher who may be a pedophile.  She’s also not convinced that her parents are really her parents, and I shared her skepticism when her tardiness in returning home from the Gardners’ seems to warrant no concerned reaction whatsoever.  In some ways the Gardners are more like family than her own parents, as she becomes more and more of a fixture in their lives.  Linda’s story is poignant, and that’s the same adjective she uses to describe an article about Princess Diana in a purloined People magazine.  She definitely seems drawn to sad people, including a girl from school who lies about contact with the suspicious history teacher.  This is a book that can even make a game of Candyland heartbreaking.