14-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the woods of northern Minnesota. Isolated and lonely, she believes she has finally found her purpose when the young Gardner family move in across the lake. She becomes a babysitter for their little boy, Paul, but fails to understand that she has entered a world where the rules are unclear to her.

This is a coming-of-age story with elements of a thriller. Linda seeks desperately to belong, to the point where she is willing to ignore obvious warning signs if it means keeping her loneliness at bay. The reader is aware through the entire book that there is something more going on beneath the surface, a steadily building sense of dread that threatens everything that at first seems so calm.

The strength of this book is in the setting. The bleak but beautiful woods laden with snow, the lake that freezes over in winter and the ice that cracks in the summer heat, and the quiet cold of the isolated settlement where Linda lives. Fridlund writes beautifully. The smallest details are captured on the page with an impeccable choice of language. The imagery is cold and fierce, winter tightening its grip just as the prose tightens its grip on the reader.

Unfortunately, where the book falls down is its pace. It all seems to be building up to some kind of huge event, a confrontation, a twist, that keeps you reading through the slower parts of the story. But towards the end it all just fades away. There is no pay off for the tension we have endured. Perhaps this was what Fridlund intended, but I found it incredibly frustrating.

This could easily have been one of those books that had ‘girl’ in the title. I was reminded of Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman, my favourite book of last year, with its story of a teenage girl seeking to find a place where she can fit in. But while Girls on Fire is flame and passion, History of Wolves is snow and solitude. Each could learn from the other; Girls on Fire was occasionally too much, too intense, but I feel History of Wolves could use a little of that intensity.

Despite this, it is the protagonist, Linda, who encourages you to keep reading when the frustration almost becomes too much. She is a very relatable character; alone, confused and frightened by the adult world she is just beginning to step into. I particularly liked that Fridlund steers clear of any kind of awkward teenage romance, often a staple of coming-of-age stories. I did find that the story lost its impact when it changed every now and again to adult Linda looking back on her teenage years, but these passages are usually short.

This is a book to read while sitting outside in nature, with nothing but the creaking of bare branches against the winter sky to disturb you, where you can focus on the writing and lose yourself in the quiet of the story. Because the writing is the point, take your time to indulge in it properly; otherwise you’ll be waiting for something to happen, only for it never to appear.

Many thanks to Orion for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.