Linda, 15, lives with her mum and dad – at least she thinks they’re her mum and dad – in the rundown cabins of an abandoned commune, out in the icy, forested, lakeside wilds of northern Minnesota.
She’s left to her own devices most of the time, and out of school – where she is labelled ‘freak’ or ‘Commie’ – she lives a semi-feral existence of solitary mooching and tramping and kayaking and dog-walking and fish-gutting.
Relief from this bleak existence appears in the form of the Gardners, an apparently normal nuclear family – mum, 4-year-old boy and mostly absent dad – who take up residence in a cabin across the lake.
Linda gets to know mum Patra and son Paul, becoming their long-term babysitter. In her desperation to be wanted, to be welcomed as part of something, she becomes a sort of benign stalker of the family.
And she also overlooks their increasingly odd behaviour when Paul falls ill and his condition worsens; ignoring his condition, indeed, becomes the price of acceptance into the family…
The chilling plot is only part of the mesmerising power of this assured and striking debut.
Fridlund deftly builds atmosphere and evokes a sense of place, generates a terrible sense of foreboding, and creates a cast of characters of utterly credible complexity.
Haunting and compelling, here is a first novel from yet another great new American novelist.
