Book Review: The history of wolves - E. Fridlund

"Later, I could get that drizzle feeling just about any time I saw a kid on a swing. The hopelessness of it—the forward excitement, the midflight return. The futile belief that the next time around, the next flight forward, you wouldn’t get dragged back again. You wouldn’t have to start over, and over.” 

A very peculiar novel, that's for sure.
The title, firstly, is very misleading in my opinion, it is not a good summary of what the book is about.
The writing style is pleasant, rich of descriptions of nature and of the settings.
The plot is quite unsettling: on one side there is a very lonely teenage girl, Linda, who lives in a former community with two parents who don't seem very involved with her life. A girl who has no friends, who is bullied at school and who clearly wants to belong somewhere.
On the other side there is a family, a picture perfect one almost,  with a doting mother, a smart 4 years old and a strict but loving father. They kind of "adopt" Linda, as a babysitter for the little kid, but in reality as part of the family.
And then all goes pear shaped and the end is catastrophic.
I did not like the lack of explanation on why the family behaved like that. It left the novel unfinished, uncompleted, in my view, and that quite irritated me.
I did not understand the link between the teacher accused of sexual harassment with everything else.
I did find the novel quite depressing, Linda doesn't really change or grow or improve her life at all. She remains in a state of misery and, when she finds potential happiness for a while, she then leaves it to go backwards.
Overall, a novel I did not like, it did not leave me anything, nor gave me any kind of emotions, it just left me with an uneasy sense of desolation.

Overall rating:  5     Plot: 4     Writing style: 5      Cover:  7

Title: The history of wolves

Author: Emily Fridlund
Publisher: W&N
Pages: 288
Publication year: 2017

The Plot:

How far would you go to belong? Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in an ex-commune beside a lake in the beautiful, austere backwoods of northern Minnesota. The other girls at school call Linda 'Freak', or 'Commie'. Her parents mostly leave her to her own devices, whilst the other inhabitants have grown up and moved on. So when the perfect family - mother, father and their little boy, Paul - move into the cabin across the lake, Linda insinuates her way into their orbit. She begins to babysit Paul and feels welcome, that she finally has a place to belong. Yet something isn't right. Drawn into secrets she doesn't understand, Linda must make a choice. But how can a girl with no real knowledge of the world understand what the consequences will be?

The Author:

Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota and currently resides in the Finger Lakes region of New York. 
Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, Five Chapters, New Orleans Review, New Delta Review, Chariton Review, The Portland Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly.  She holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. 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.