![]() ![]() ![]() One concerns an eighth-grade teacher accused of owning child porn another is tangled in the newcomer family’s Christian Science. They hovered, waiting winter out with driftwood, barely beating their hearts.” As dread coils around Linda, the novel gives up its secrets slowly. They did not try to swim, or do anything that required effort. Her sense of cold freezes the reader: “Beneath a foot of ice, beneath my boots, the walleye drifted. Fridlund is an assured writer: she knows how water tuts against a boat hull and how mosquitoes descend into any patch of shade. 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. ![]() 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. 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. It’s a 17-page stunner that begins with a child ghost and ends in a chorus of communal condemnation. An atmospheric, near-gothic coming-of-age novel turns on the dance between predator and prey.įridlund’s debut won the McGinnis-Ritchie Award in 2013 for its first chapter. ![]()
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