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Book Reviewed by:
Rebecca Foster
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After a hurricane devastates a small town in upstate New York, the lives of three women and their young children are irrevocably changed.
Rin, an Iraq War veteran, tries to protect her blind daughter and the three wolves under her care. Naema, a widowed doctor who fled Iraq with her wounded son, faces life-threatening injuries and confusion about her feelings for Louis, a veteran and widower harboring his own secrets and guilt. Beth, who is raising a troubled son, waits out her marine husband's deployment in Afghanistan, equally afraid of him coming home and of him never returning at all.
As they struggle to maintain their humanity and find hope, their war-torn lives collide in a way that will affect their entire community.
"We're here!" Juney sings out. She knows the town of Huntsville even when it's midmorning quiet and raining: the asphalt steaming, the wet-dust funk of newly soaked concrete.
Rin drives down the main drag, a wide, lonely street with half its windows boarded up and not a soul to be seen. A Subway on the left, a Dunkin' Donuts on the right, its sign missing so many letters it reads, duk do. The CVS and three banks that knocked out all the local diners and dime stores. A Styrofoam cup skitters along the gutter, chipped and muddied by rain.
Pulling up the hill into an asphalt parking lot, Rin chooses a spot as far away from the other cars as she can get, her stomach balling into a leathery knot. She hates this town. She hates this clinic. She hates doctors and nurses. She hates people.
Pause, swallow, command the knot to release. It won't. She sweeps her eyes over the macadam, down the hill to the clinic, over to the creek bubbling along behind it. Back and forth, back and...
The main theme here is "how very long the reach of war turns out to be," as Naema puts it. I found a few of the coincidental connections between characters a bit hard to believe, and thought the book might have packed more punch if the collisions of characters and subplots had been allowed to get even darker at the end. However, the novel is a powerful picture of the limits of compassion and the knee-jerk nature of emotions: prejudice directed against immigrants and the fear of wolves...continued
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
[Helen Benedict] has emerged as one of our most thoughtful and provocative writers of war literature.
David Abrams, author of Fobbit and Brave Deeds, at the Quivering Pen Cara Hoffman, author of Be Safe I Love You and Running
Fierce and vivid and full of hope, this story of trauma and resilience, of love and family, of mutual aid and solidarity in the aftermath of a brutal war is nothing short of magic. Elissa Schappell, author of Use Me and Blueprints for Building Better Girls
No one writes with more authority or cool-eyed compassion about the experience of women in war both on and off the battlefield than Helen Benedict... Wolf Season is more than a novel for our times; it should be required reading. Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War and Youngblood
A novel of love, loss, and survival, Wolf Season delves into the complexities and murk of the after-war with blazing clarity. You will come to treasure these characters for their strengths and foibles alike. Helen Benedict has delivered yet again, and contemporary war literature is much the better for it.In Helen Benedict's novel Wolf Season, a character illegally keeps pet wolves behind a fence on her upstate New York property. At first her neighbors don't believe she actually has wolves – they think it's just a rumor passed around by children – but when they realize the wolves are real they become alarmed and look for legal means to address the situation.
Throughout history, attempts have been made to domesticate wolves to help with certain human activities, such as pulling sleds, serving as hunting dogs, or working as police dogs. Wolves and wolf–dog hybrids may seem like appealing pets for animal-lovers, but there are some serious reasons why owning a wolf should not be considered a valid alternative to owning a ...
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