William Morrow, 2018

REVIEWED BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Jamey Bradbury’s The Wild Inside is one of those rare narratives that constantly morphs and reveals itself in new skin while still retaining a few secrets and surprises at it’s core. Beautifully written and packing an ending that is as heart-wrenching as it is poetic, this debut novel is the kind of debut that makes promises while screaming from the top of the mountain that a new voice is here, and it deserves to be heard.

Tracy Petrikoff spends her life between the forests surrounding her family’s home and the running dogs that share the property with them. Things like parties, education, and boyfriends are not on her agenda. Instead, she lives for the wilderness, the cold wind in her face, and the sounds of the forest as she zooms by on the back of her sled. Her days are spent tracking animals, running with her dogs, dreaming about racing in the Iditarod, and in the company of her father and brother, both of whom are, like her, still reeling from the unexpected loss of her mother to a car accident. While the loss was tough on everyone, it was especially so for Tracy because she and her mother shared a deeper connection, something that made them special and that Tracy now wishes she could ask about a bit more. The thing that brought them closer together had some rules. Chief among them was: never make a person bleed. Unfortunately, when Tracy has a quick, bizarre, violent encounter with a man in the woods, she breaks this rule. The event ends with Tracy knocked out after her head hits a gnarly root and waking up to silent woods and the man’s backpack, which he left behind during his escape. However, that ending was just the beginning of something else. The next day, the man shows up at their property and quickly passes out from his wounds. Where they caused by Tracy? What exactly happened in the woods? With the man in the hospital, a mysterious youngster appears at their home, looking for a job. The kid, Jesse Goodwin, is a hard worker and gets along with Mr. Petrikoff immediately, but there is something about his story that doesn’t add up. Between figuring out the truth about Jesse, learning to keep her impulses under control, his father’s new love, and the fear that the man in the hospital will soon return to get his backpack, which Tracy has under her bed, the narrative begins to spiral into a maelstrom of loss, doubt, and secrets that crescendos into an unexpected, explosive finale.

There is something unique about Tracy’s voice. It’s is at once uneducated and poetic, truthful and given to counterproductive inner dialogues, always doubting but somehow sure of what she hides from others and only lets out in the woods. That voice makes her a likeable character from the first page, and that likeability never diminishes, which leads to the novel’s last third to feel like a stab wound to the heart. Simply put, The Wild Inside is a narrative about growing up, but one that packs more loss, tension, and strangeness than normal. In fact, it is so like other coming of age narratives that even drinking the blood of animals out in the woods quickly becomes something we accept as a normal part of Tracy’s abnormal life:

“The other kind of learning, you drink it in, too. It’s warm and it spreads through you, wakes up your muscles and sharpens your mind, and you can see clearly, not just with your eyes but with your whole self, and then you know what you didn’t before. How a squirrel plans its route from branch to branch. How a mouse will hear you before it ever sees you. How a snowshoe hare knows to run in a zigzag, not in a straight line, to confuse its predator. Every piece of knowing makes the next hunt easier.”

On the surface, The Wild Inside has everything it needs to be a successful novel: it’s entertaining, the writing pulls you in, the backdrop is beautiful and wild, the dogs are a pleasure to be around even if you can’t touch them, and every character is multilayered. However, Bradbury takes things a step further by tackling the nature of righteous violence, the way our ow imagination can get the best of us and make good people do horrible things, and the unexpected ways a loss can affect the internal dynamics of a household. Lastly, it also deals with Otherness in the form of Jesse, who hides a secret as deep as any Tracy hides. This character evolves and the writing follows, making a strong case for the inherent normalcy in Otherness. There is no judgement here, only a youngster coming to terms with what he is in a world that often refuses to understand people like him. Ultimately, the way Bradbury deals with Jesse pushes the novel into the absolute must-read category:

“But once he started living the way he was meant to live, things changed. He didn’t have to explain to me how he’d new words like girl and she and her didn’t fit him, no matter what other people said, or why you giving himself a buzz cut at thirteen felt so good. You’ll look ridiculous in your Easter dress, his mother had said and I felt the sting of her words, all the lightness an joy a gone out of him when he seen the disappointment on her face.”

There is a lot of blood in The Wild Inside, but every drop is spilled with a purpose. Similarly, every word, every passage, and every action in the narrative has a reason, and that makes the last third of the novel work so well. When you don’t know all the facts, being right, fearing things, and planning are all floating signifiers with closed eyes. That Bradbury delivered a gripping story in which all of these play a major role is a testament to her talent, and a clear sign that she is here to stay.