Crown Publishing, July 5, 2016.
Five Stars
When Elka was only seven years old, she was rescued
from a violent storm by a man named Trapper. Living in a near future world in
which technology has disappeared after an event only referred to as the “Big
Damn Stupid”, Elka would not have survived on her own without the help of Trapper,
a solitary hunter who lives alone in a cabin in the woods. Theirs is a life of
subsistence, as he teaches the young girl to hunt, fish and survive off the
grid (although the grid is gone, too). Trapper gives Elka the freedom to grow
in the wild – but in fact his training might have more sinister motives.
As Elka grows, she begins travelling into town on her
own to gather supplies for the cabin. The world has reverted to a modern wild
west, and Elka has a run in with the new sheriff, a woman named Magistrate
Lyon, who points out a wanted poster with an eerily familiar face – the poster
identifies a man named Kreagar Hallet, but he is the man Elka knows as Trapper.
Without any other family, Elka has always considered Trapper as a father
figure, but with this new information she begins to reanalyze certain
situations that have occurred in their isolated lives. Elka remembers there was
once a woman running in fear through their camp, and she realizes that Trapper
may not have always just been hunting animals.
Because Elka followed Trapper unquestioningly, she
feels complicit in his crimes. However, her immediate concern is for her own
safety, and she flees into the wilderness to escape both Trapper and Magistrate
Lyon. She encounters many dangers and makes a few friends – I did feel this was
the weakest part of the novel, and it dragged on a bit, but it picked up again
quickly. With her new friend Penelope and a strangely faithful wolf, Elka travels
north to what was probably Alaska, in search of her parents who followed the
gold rush. In this desolate landscape, Elka will have a final confrontation
with Trapper, one she is not sure that her guilty conscience will permit her to
survive.
The novel is written in the first person, and for the
most part lives inside Elka’s head – it could be a limiting perspective, but it
is actually engrossing. Elka is an unreliable narrator because she has blocked
out many of her childhood memories, and we discover them at the same time as
she does. She is shocked by her own past, and it is indeed gritty and
disturbing. In spite of her complexities, Elka’s voice is tough, quirky, and
darkly funny.
The language is also unique – it is a sort of
frontier dialect, with some words that only become clear in context, but once
you get into it, the sentences flow seamlessly. We are immersed in the dark
depths of Elka’s conscience, and there are many issues to grapple with, but
these aspects don’t slow down the plot at all – instead, they work together to propel
the story.
There is an incredible sense of setting – a snow-covered,
wild landscape in a world that has been reset by the destruction of technology.
We aren’t told exactly what happened to cause the world to end up this way, but
it has resulted in powerful extremes of nature, including the thunderhead
storms that killed Elka’s last remaining family and destroyed her home. This is
a post-apocalyptic setting, but it does not define the novel. Instead, it is
more of a psychological thriller, but unlike any others in the genre. The
tension is ratcheted up because the villain is off-stage throughout the story –
and yet he is also too close for comfort, inside Elka’s mind. The Wolf Road is
engaging right from the start, and it ends back where it begins, coming full
circle into a completely satisfying ending. I look forward to more from debut
author Beth Lewis.
I received this novel from Crown Publishing and
NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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