History of Wolves

Starred review from October 3, 2016
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, Aragi Inc.

Starred review from October 15, 2016
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.

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Starred review from August 1, 2017

Winter falls hard in northern Minnesota. So 14-year-old Linda watches with interest when, months before the thaw, a young mother and her son return alone to their summer house across the lake. Linda is drawn into their lives when the mother, Patra, asks her to watch four-year-old Paul while Patra edits manuscripts. Linda is deeply affected by the intensity of Patra's care for Paul, so different from the nonchalance of her own mother. The teen is an untamed storyteller, and her past and present swing about as she interrupts one plot thread in pursuit of another, as if the emotional connections among events supersede chronology. A succession of days spent with Patra and Paul veer into a deluge of memories from Linda's childhood in a commune or recollections of her former history teacher, who may have molested a classmate. Fridlund's crystalline descriptions keep the narrative focused, but nearly everything else in the book, including Linda's true name, is subject to interpretation. The author foreshadows tragedy, which arrives with the unimaginable brutality of a Minnesotan blizzard. VERDICT Teens who appreciated the natural settings and poetic writing of Ron Rash's The World Made Straight and The Cove or the stylistic complexity of Louise Erdrich's The Round House will love this one. This strikingly original tale, so rooted in its natural setting, will captivate readers with a penchant for powerful, unorthodox prose.-Diane Colson, Librarian, City College, Gainesville, FL

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2016
Fraught with foreboding, Fridlund's first novel is the story of 14-year-old Linda, who lives with her erstwhile cult-member parents in a cabin in the northern Minnesota woods. When new neighbors, the Gardners, move into their summer cottage across the lake, Linda becomes babysitter for their five-year-old son and an increasingly large presence in their livesand they in hers. In the meantime, her new history teacher, Mr. Grierson, has been found to possess child pornography and is fired, but not before he has an alleged affair with one of Linda's classmates, the beautiful Lily with whom Linda is fascinated. The novel moves backward and forward in time to good effect, showing us the enigmatic adult Linda will become. The isolated setting reinforces a theme of loneliness that pervades the book and lends it an often bleak, even desolate, air that reinforces the uncertain, nagging knowledge that something is wrong with the Gardners. The writing is beautiful throughout ( the sun broke over the treetops, turning every surface into a flat knife of light; a man is stubborn like a stain ) and is a triumph of tone and attitude. Lovers of character-driven literary fiction will embrace this one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2016

Winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie award for its first chapter, this BEA Buzz book features 14-year-old social outcast Linda, living with her post-commune parents in Minnesota's northern woods. Soon she realizes that the personal beliefs of the couple for whom she babysits are threatening the well-being of their child.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2016

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

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.