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What Should Be Wild: A Novel
Unavailable
What Should Be Wild: A Novel
Unavailable
What Should Be Wild: A Novel
Ebook393 pages6 hours

What Should Be Wild: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this ebook

“Delightful and darkly magical. Julia Fine has written a beautiful modern myth, a coming-of-age story for a girl with a worrisome power over life and death. I loved it.”  —Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry

Finalist for the Bram Stoker Superior Achievement in a First Novel Award • Shortlisted for the Chicago Review of Books Best Novel Prize • A Bustle Unmissable Debut of the Year • A Popsugar Best Book of the Year • A Washington Post Best Fantasy Book of May • A Refinery 29 Best May Book • A Chicago Review of Books Best May Book • A Verge Gripping Fantasy Novel of May

In this darkly funny, striking debut, a highly unusual young woman must venture into the woods at the edge of her home to remove a curse that has plagued the women in her family for millennia—an utterly original novel with all the mesmerizing power of The Tiger’s Wife, The Snow Child, and Swamplandia!

Cursed. Maisie Cothay has never known the feel of human flesh: born with the power to kill or resurrect at her slightest touch, she has spent her childhood sequestered in her family’s manor at the edge of a mysterious forest. Maisie’s father, an anthropologist who sees her as more experiment than daughter, has warned Maisie not to venture into the wood. Locals talk of men disappearing within, emerging with addled minds and strange stories. What he does not tell Maisie is that for over a millennium her female ancestors have also vanished into the wood, never to emerge—for she is descended from a long line of cursed women.

But one day Maisie’s father disappears, and Maisie must venture beyond the walls of her carefully constructed life to find him. Away from her home and the wood for the very first time, she encounters a strange world filled with wonder and deception. Yet the farther she strays, the more the wood calls her home. For only there can Maisie finally reckon with her power and come to understand the wildest parts of herself.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateMay 8, 2018
ISBN9780062684158
Author

Julia Fine

Julia Fine is the author of the critically acclaimed debut What Should Be Wild, which was short-listed for both the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel and the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction. She teaches writing in Chicago, Illinois where she lives with her husband and children.

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Reviews for What Should Be Wild

Rating: 3.3297872340425534 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

47 ratings8 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Hm. I think this book was trying to do too much and wasn't quite successful.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A strange, fluid read. Amazing transgression of boundaries between historic and original myth. Occasionally uncomfortably close to my particular real-world religious upbringing. Things I wish: that I cared about Matthew or was truly horrified by Rafe; that Maisie managed to make a female friend; that there was... any... hint of queerness in a very queer story.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    For such an interesting premise and a gorgeous cover, this book failed to live up to it's potential. A family with a mystical past of missing girls who disappeared into the ether culminates in the body of a young girl born to dead mother with the power to kill with her touch. Sheltered all her life, and a virtual prisoner in her home due to her gift/curse, Maisie is all alone when her father suddenly disappears. Joined by two young men in an attempt to find her father and unravel the family's secret, the story line goes off the rails in a bizarre way, never to return to a reasonable plot. I didn't even make it to the last chapter because I completely lost interest.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I can't claim this as an honest review. This was a book club read, but sadly, it wasn't doing it for me and I gave up about 1/4 of the way through. My mind kept wandering and I wasn't finding myself looking forward to returning to the story, so I bailed (which I rarely do).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What do you get when you mix Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Poison Ivy, trapped spirits, purgatory, a family curse, dubious science experiments and a pretty little girl who lives next to a mythical forest? You get this exquisitely crafted little book. I thoroughly enjoyed this tale that's spans centuries and surprised me every time I thought I knew what was next. It was released Tuesday; you should go read it. Then tell me what you thought. No, really, what did you think??
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Weird, twisted fairy tale/magical realism.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Julia Fine’s feminist fable seems very timely in the wake of 2017’s Nasty Women and #TimesUp movements, so I was very eager to check it out. It’s the story of Maisie Cothay, a girl born with the ability to instantly kill or resurrect anything with a single touch. Even a piece of unfinished wooden floorboard will begin to sprout upon contact with the bottom of Maisie’s bare foot. Her father, whom she refers to as Peter, is an anthropologist who keeps her a virtual prisoner of her late mother’s family manor. He's a cold fish, only interested in studying her peculiar condition in order to achieve academic acclaim. Maisie’s life would be entirely without affection or joy save for their loyal housekeeper, Mrs. Blott, and the occasional visit to an eccentric elderly invalid called Mother Farrow, who regales her with stories of the monsters and witches that prowl the large forest bordering the family's estate.The book alternates between Maisie’s story and those of the previous tenants of the manor, her female ancestors, all of whom eventually fled into the forest and have been trapped there – ageless and outside of time – for generations. All seven of them live in a perpetual summer waiting for something or someone to free them. Each ended up in there because she was somehow unable [or unwilling] to conform to proper, acceptable and/or desirable norms of womanhood. One is unsightly (a child disfigured with a port wine stain), one an unmarriageable spinster, one is sexually voracious, another intolerant of her husband’s infidelities and yet another is simply unfit to fulfill her wifely duties of homemaking and entertaining. The reader soon understands that even though Maisie is a modern girl, she has no more agency than any of the women who came before her because her father has kept her isolated and ignorant of the outside world. That quickly changes when he goes missing and she must leave the confines of her home to find him. A course of action that eventually leads her into the forbidden forest to confront the ghosts of her family history. Of course these women aren’t the story’s antagonists, they’re merely victims, like Maisie, who long to be free. Frankly, I was surprised at the dark and rather disturbing turn the story takes about two-thirds of the way in. While the naïve Maisie initially finds an ally in Mrs. Blott’s nephew, she eventually turns her back on him and falls victim to men who are only interested in exploiting her unusual abilities. This is a dark contemporary fantasy novel that comments on the plight of women. It illustrates how years of conditioning can give women the illusion that they’ve chosen certain ways of being or behaving. Maisie is the prime example of that – first with her father keeping her completely isolated from normal society, subjecting her to strict boundaries and rules and forcing her to undergo relentless, exhausting tests, then later with her captors with whom she suffers Stockholm Syndrome in her eagerness to please them. This is about the systematic “taming” of women that’s been going on since time immemorial and continues to this day (thus the title). I wanted to love this book, but honestly, there’s a fair amount of it that isn’t terribly subtle. The depiction of the “shortcomings” of Maisie’s forebears and their families responses were particularly ham-fisted and a bit over-the-top. And, in light of all that had gone before, I was a bit surprised at the ending (although not necessarily let down). This is a classic coming of age story with fantasy elements, a quest, suspense, a dash of romance and a heaping dose of feminist politics. Despite being overly obvious at times, it was engaging and suspenseful enough to keep me turning pages until the [rather satisfying] end.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Little Maisie Cothay was born from her mother’s dead body. Right away (thankfully) her father discovered that the touch of her bare skin would kill- or resurrect. It could even happen repeatedly- she killed her father several times before reaching toddlerhood. She could even resurrect the long dead, which necessitated coating all the bare wood floors and trims in the house she grew up in with several coats of varnish, and making sure she only wore synthetic fiber clothing. She grew up in her mother’s decrepit Blakely family mansion in a large forest, with only her anthropologist father (who seems to see her as a long running experiment) and the housekeeper for company. Her father educated her and she read everything in the large library- being careful to wear gloves, of course. But one day the housekeeper dies, she accidently runs into the housekeeper’s nephew, and her father disappears. This is when she decides she must go on a quest to find her father. She’s not the first girl of her mother’s family to go into the forest, which was forbidden to her. Through the years, many have gone in and not returned. Maisie also finds herself going into the city and meeting new people for the first time. It’s a very abrupt and sudden coming of age as she explores both areas, and finds that evil can wear an attractive face. The story is a fantasy, coming of age, fairy tale. Unlike in most fairy tales, the girl is the hero, not the princess in distress. There is a sleeping beauty, but she isn’t waiting for a prince to kiss her. It’s well written, and I liked the back stories of the Blakely women in the woods. I enjoyed the book, but I can only give it four stars; there were some problems with pacing, and something lacking in the Blakely women in the woods.