A promising talent makes her electrifying debut with this unforgettable novel, set in the Alaskan wilderness, that is a fusion of psychological thriller and coming-of-age tale in the vein of Jennifer McMahon, Chris Bohjalian, and Mary Kubica.
A natural born trapper and hunter raised in the Alaskan wilderness, Tracy Petrikoff spends her days tracking animals and running with her dogs in the remote forests surrounding her family’s home. Though she feels safe in this untamed land, Tracy still follows her late mother’s rules: Never Lose Sight of the House. Never Come Home with Dirty Hands. And, above all else, Never Make a Person Bleed.
But these precautions aren’t enough to protect Tracy when a stranger attacks her in the woods and knocks her unconscious. The next day, she glimpses an eerily familiar man emerge from the tree line, gravely injured from a vicious knife wound—a wound from a hunting knife similar to the one she carries in her pocket. Was this the man who attacked her and did she almost kill him? With her memories of the events jumbled, Tracy can’t be sure.
Helping her father cope with her mother’s death and prepare for the approaching Iditarod, she doesn’t have time to think about what she may have done. Then a mysterious wanderer appears, looking for a job. Tracy senses that Jesse Goodwin is hiding something, but she can’t warn her father without explaining about the attack—or why she’s kept it to herself.
It soon becomes clear that something dangerous is going on . . . the way Jesse has wormed his way into the family . . . the threatening face of the stranger in a crowd . . . the boot-prints she finds at the forest’s edge.
Her family is in trouble. Will uncovering the truth protect them—or is the threat closer than Tracy suspects?
About the Author:
Jamey Bradbury is the author of The Wild Inside, forthcoming from William Morrow, March 20, 2018. The Wild Inside, her first novel, will also be published in Poland, Italy, Hungary, and France.
Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review (winner of the annual fiction contest), Sou’wester, and Zone 3. She won an Estelle Campbell Memorial Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters.
She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.
Noteworthy experiences while reading this book:
The land sounds amazing. The main character is a sociopath.
No.
Recommend this book?
No. In fact, I recommend NOT reading it.
To start, I feel I need to give you some background about myself. I come from a family of hunters. I have seen my food alive before I ate it and I've seen the heads after/while eating them. In fact when fishing, I will bait my own hook, catch the fish, take it off the hook, and clean the fish. I am not a squeamish person. I have no issues with hunting, blood or anything of that nature.
That being said, at 46% through this book I quit reading it and refuse to finish it. It is really hard for me to not finish a book but this book made me sick. I literally almost puked while reading this book. First off, the main character is a sociopath who started drinking the blood of the animals she killed at four or five years old. When she was about ten years old, her mother found out and instead of correcting Tracy's behavior, the mother let her continue and just gave her rules to live by. These rules came after her bit her little brother's finger and tasted his blood. Throughout the book, it talks about her need to drink the blood of the creatures she hunts and that she is just a little wild inside. This wildness also drove her to snap the neck and drink the barn cat's blood after not being allowed to go into the woods for a while and when one of the hired helpers saw her, she chased him down and bit his neck drawing blood. The book goes back and forth between before her mother passed away to the current time line of her mother being dead for a while. During one of these flashbacks, she gets her period for the first time and runs away to the woods. She stays out there for a while and at some point DRINKS HER OWN PERIOD BLOOD and says its unlike drinking the blood of others because you only get flashbacks of your own memories unlike with the creatures she hunts where she gets their memories and feelings. That is the point that I had to stop reading.
It is messed up. There is lots of blood and killing of things. The main character is basically a sociopath. There is drinking of animal and human blood by a human girl who is 17 years old or younger.
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