What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine

Harper, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062684134

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

What Should Be Wild is a flawed, if gorgeously written dark fairytale. Julia Fine has outdone herself in establishing a disturbing, unwieldy, and wild Gothic setting for her story of  Maisie, a girl born with the power of life and death in her touch. The women of the Blakely family are believed to be under a curse: many of them have terrible stories that led them into the dark wood behind the family home, Urizon, never to be seen again. The story alternates between the present day, with Maisie narrating, and third-person narratives about the other Blakely women who disappeared, who are now trapped in a timeless dimension in the wood where things are just starting to change.

Not without reason, Maisie has been kept in isolation from the rest of the world by her anthropologist father and the family housekeeper. Unable to touch without killing, she is starved for affection, and has to work to suppress her urges to touch the things and people around her, following rules strictly enforced by her father. Her solace is in stories, especially local history and customs, folklore, and fairytales. These stories, and the structure imposed on her by her father, are the only patterns she has for connecting to the world around her– in short, she is naive, sheltered, and unable to imagine people who don’t follow the patterns of the narratives she knows.  When she discovers the family housekeeper’s death and runs away to process it, she discovers on her return that her father has disappeared to search for her. Matthew, the housekeeper’s nephew, steps in to accompany her when she decides to search for him. They then encounter Rafe, who claims to be a colleague of her father’s also looking for him– that both he and her father have been searching for a way to enter the wild wood where the Blakely women are trapped. Up to the point that Maisie encounters Rafe, her first-person narration is really interesting. It gets us inside her head, as an unusual child with perceptions that are far different than the norm. At that point, Maisie’s naivete becomes more and more frustrating, as it becomes quickly obvious what the characters’ motivations are, and they become pretty one-dimensional for most of the journey.

When the search takes the three of them to the city, both men disappear from the picture, and Maisie is left in a horrific situation. She is drugged and trapped, without means of escape, while a man drains her of blood for a mysterious purpose, and after several weeks he realizes that her power can be used to his financial benefit, as when she “kills” an animal, it enters stasis rather than decaying. The terrifying months of being drained and having angry animals released into the room she’s locked in are horrific to read about and jarring compared to the rest of the book, but Maisie’s lack of agency and desperation, and her connection to the wood behind Urizon, start to affect the actions and events occurring among the Blakely women and the growth of the wood.

The stories of each of the Blakely women trapped in the wood, written in third person, are interspersed throughout Maisie’s story. This helps make them a little more real: otherwise they are really just a group of bodies and names. Each woman or girl in the wood in some way fell outside the narrative of conventional womanhood: too ill, too unattractive, too stubborn, too disobedient, too old, too foreign, too promiscuous. Yet, falling outside the narrative of conventional womanhood doesn’t mean they don’t have their own stories, although the stories have become more of tales cautioning people against entering the wood, than local history connected to any particular name. Maisie, too, has her own story connected to the woods, and it starts out much like a quest narrative– but the actual ending doesn’t require the kind of challenge I had expected and is rather anticlimactic.

I had some frustrations with the way characters were portrayed in this book. With its strong connection to a fairy-tale style of writing, I wasn’t expecting all fully developed characters, especially in the woods and the stories of the Blakely women, since most fairy tale characters are stand-ins for archetypes. But this is a novel, not a fairytale, and a little more depth and consistency with the characters of Matthew, Rafe, and Peter would have been appreciated. The book also had some confusing moments and left many unanswered questions. For instance, Maisie’s dog and her relationship with him was very odd, and the overprotective Matthew suddenly leaving Maisie when he knew she was vulnerable was surprising. The actions of the unknown girl in the forest were baffling.

This book has been described as a feminist fairytale, and it certainly does hit you over the head with its repeated focus on women’s lack of agency and the way they have been forced to suppress their desires in favor of fitting a pre-existing narrative of femininity. That is a strong and important message. But I really felt the lack of any  fully (or even mostly) supportive male characters was a disservice. Every single man in this book was trying to control some woman’s body or actions, if not physically, than by patronizing, threatening, or manipulating them. This was true even for Matthew, who was the most sympathetic male character. Given the treatment of all the women in this book, the curse of the Blakely women appears to be not that they were so desperate to escape the men victimizing them that they’d rather spend eternity in the wood but that hundreds of years later, while women might have evolved, men’s treatment of them pretty much hadn’t changed at all. While the fairytale here appears to have a happy ending for Maisie, the story of the women in the wood, and the world, is ongoing.

Despite any issues I have with it, this is an unusual, compelling, and memorable story, with lush and beautiful writing. It doesn’t move quickly, but you will find yourself lost inside Fine’s dark, wild, wood, and in her tale, if you care to enter. Highly recommended.

Contains: body horror, cannibalism, animal cruelty, murder, torture.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Editor’s note: What Should Be Wild is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards.