Wild Life

by Molly Gloss

It is the early 1900s and Charlotte Bridger Drummond is a thoroughly modern woman. The sole provider for her five young boys, Charlotte is a fiercely independent, freethinking woman of the West who fully embraces the scientific spirit that is sweeping the nation at the dawn of the industrial age. Thumbing her nose at convention, she dresses in men's clothes, avoids housework whenever possible, and proudly supports her family by writing popular women's adventure stories. Ready to show off her knowledge of the local flora and fauna and have an adventure of her own, Charlotte joins a search party for a child who has disappeared in the deepwood wilderness on the border between Oregon and Washington. But when she gets lost herself, she is thrust into a mysterious world that not only tests her courage but challenges her entire concept of reality.

Starving and half dead from exposure, Charlotte is rescued by a band of elusive, quasi-human beasts. As she becomes a part of the creatures' extended family, Charlotte is forced to reconsider her previous notions about the differences between animals and humans, men and women, and above all, between wilderness and civilization.

Beautifully written and historically accurate, "Wild Life" is a highly original tale set at the very edge of civilization, where one woman takes on the untamed world of nature, and in the process, discovers much about the deepest recesses of her very own human nature.

Putting a surprising, revitalizing, feminine spin on the classic legend of Tarzan and other wildman sagas, award-winning novelist Molly Gloss delivers a rich portrait of America's northwestern frontier at the start of the twentieth century.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, Science Fiction, Book Club, Speculative Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published June 8, 2000

About the author

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who lives in Portland.

Her novel The Jump-Off Creek was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction, and a winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Oregon Book Award. In 1996 Molly was a recipient of a Whiting Writers Award.

The Dazzle of Day was named a New York Times Notable Book and was awarded the PEN Center West Fiction Prize.

Wild Life won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was chosen as the 2002 selection for "If All Seattle Read the Same Book."

Reviews

[Bee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my favorite book of the last couple years, Wild Life simultaneously explores pioneer life, the conflicting draws of creativity and family, the history of trashy fantasy novels, the nature of evil, and a magical and enduring Pacific Northwest legend. All wrapped into a whalloping adventure with an engaging and fast-paced plot. Spectacle with depth. LOVED it.

[Ivana Books Are Magic · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea, I'm afraid. A woman gets lost in the woods after joining a rescue search party, encounters wild creatures and befriends them but it all takes too long and there is no character development to speak of. What is the meaning of it all? How is her life profoundly changed by the experience? I didn't find the writing poetic at all, the big words are all there but there is no poetry. I mean the author does have a nice vocabulary, but it doesn't necessarily translate to much. The descriptions of the wilderness were nice at times, but noting special.

There were some touching moments in Wild Life, but there were far and far between. On overall, the book bored me and I really had to work to get through it. The writing format in this one just didn't work for me. The narrative is written in the first person, this book is often interrupted by passages from other voices and the protagonist's own writing. Somehow it made it more confusing and difficult to follow. The book is very slow paced and there really isn't much happening. There were a few pages I enjoyed, but only a few, hence my low rating. In addition, I struggled to feel for the protagonist. She seems more a symbol then a real person.

The protagonist of this book is an early feminist raising up five kids by herself after her husband's death. She spends a lot of time complaining about how hard it is to be a woman and do the woman's work even if she actually refuses all household duties and hires a maid to help her. What she does for living is to write and she has a very high opinion of herself- and that is fine but it gets old pretty soon. She believes in the natural superiority of women and finds all the man brutes (except Jules Verne whom she apparently likes and admires as a writer but that's all right because he conveniently dies at the start of the novel and one is allowed to speak kindly about the dead). She likes to dress like a man, but she puts on a stunningly beautiful hairdo so there is no mistaking her sex and she enjoys to bewilder people. That's all fine too but what is she like as a person at her core? We never do get to find out. I felt like she is more a feminist symbol then a real person and I guess that is why I found it so hard to relate to.

When she is reunited with her sons, she cries because she wasn't with them when they were sick, but somehow even that feels out of character. We don't really get to see her relationship with her kids evolve or amount to anything meaningful. We don't get to know her sons, not really. They are just symbols too. What is the meaning of it all? What is this novel really about? Where is the real plot, the character development, the deeper message? Is there any? Even her relationship with the wild people is left hanging. Will she go back to them? Will she try to help them? There were a few touching moments there, but it didn't amount to much. What was this book really about? Was it just written because feminist novels are in? I don't know, but I can't say that I enjoyed it.

[Shirleynature · Rating 4 out of 5]

Immersive wilderness fiction of a feminist writer’s experiences in early 20th century Washington State. She reveals fantastic encounters with a mythological beast! Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award (fantasy that expands our understanding of gender).

I want to re-read this story; it's been living in my visual memory ever since I first read it. An independent woman in the early 19th century Pacific Northwestern U.S. befriends a bigfoot, magical historical fantasy!

So, I recently asked my library to consider buying it and just like magic, a re-issue edition is now on order at my library!

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I walked around inside this book for days. It's written as the diary of a woman - pioneer feminist raised on the Columbia River in Washington, mother of 5, novel-writer, adventurer, tough-minded poet-tongued - set in 1902 when the Douglas fir were as big around at the base as our houses are now. You may not like historical novels or diary forms or stuff about the Pacific Northwest - never mind what you don't like. You'll be amazed at this book. I liked Jump-Off Creek, also by Gloss, but I loved this one.

[David H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea what to expect with this novel, but what I got was an excellently-written diary of a fictional and mostly unsentimental radical feminist mother/pulp novelist in the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest who joined a search party for a lost girl which all went wrong. Charlotte was a great character with acknowledged flaws (with even bigger flaws visible to the modern reader), and my book club had a great time discussing it even though half of us loved it, and the other half hated it.

[Sandra de Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are:
• a woman
• a writer
• a reader
• a thinker
• an adventurer
• a believer in Big Foot
• a lover of fiction
• especially a lover of literary fiction
• or historical fiction
• or magical realism
Molly Gloss's Wild Life is the book you've waited for your entire life.
Although I was alive, well, reading and on the Internet, I somehow missed the fact that Wild Life was published in 2000. I was already a fan of Gloss, having read The Jump Off Creek. I lived in the Pacific Northwest where most of her writing is set. I'm hiked the woods, camped by the rivers, the lakes, and the Pacific Ocean. I've taken several writing retreats in the surrounds of the moss-covered grounds, the shade of the giant trees, slept in a tent in old growth forests. I've often imagined seeing of the mythical beasts called Sasquatch, Bigfoot, or skoocooms.
Molly Gloss describes the land of myths and moss better than anyone I've read. Her strong woman protagonists make their homes there. In Jump Off Creek, her protagonist was homesteader Lydia Sanderson, a widow who travels to the Oregon Mountains with two goats, two mules and only what the mules can carry. Her journal documents her first nine months homesteading and shatters myths. Turns out women can do all the jobs men do, and men can also cook and clean. It is Gloss's ability to provide vivid detail in such a way the reader is never distracted, but drawn into the setting, that makes her work unforgettable.
In Falling from Horses, the hero Bud Frazer grew up in Oregon, who has cowboyed for his parents since he was five years old. At nineteen he goes to Hollywood (it's the end of the Great Depression) and becomes a stunt rider for the movies. In this book, we can easily see why the Screen Actors Guild finally insisted (in 1980) that animals no longer be hurt in the making of movies, and that all films with animals proclaim that none have been hurt. When Bud went to Hollywood, stunt people were treated no better than the misused animals. In Falling from Horses, Gloss made great use of her ability to tell a story from more than one point of view and to keep the story moving forward. She repeats that style in Wild Life, with snippets from newspapers, short scenes from different characters, as well as the main style, which is the narrator as writer.
Charlotte Bridger Drummond is the narrator/writer in Wild Life. She is the daughter of a woman homesteader (alas, not Lydia Sanderson), now a deserted wife (or widow?) of five boys who supports her family with her novels. She doesn't aspire to literary writing but writes tales of adventure in order to sell books. She can't help making her women characters strong like herself.
Charlotte hires Melba, a young grandmother, to do the cooking and cleaning. The boys mostly run free all day and the family gathers after dinner for reading and games. Every spare moment, Charlotte reaches for her pencil and writes.
When Melba's son-in-law, the no-good Homer, takes his four-year-old daughter Harriet to work with him to a dangerous and distant lumber camp, it is no time before Harriet goes missing. Rumors spread that she was seen being carried off into the deep woods by an orangutan. When she isn't found after a few days, Charlotte decides to join the search.
We are treated to real life in -- and all the workings of -- the lumber business in its heyday. Donkey engines, flumes, catwalks suspended hundreds of feet above canyons and rushing water. Seventy feet tall trees come flying down the mountain, scattering boulders, upheaving earth, and creating raucous thunder for miles around.
So much money is to be made in lumber that even educated, intellectual men grow mustaches, speak in dialect, and join the throngs of men decimating the old growth forests.
An occasional woman finds her way into employment here as well. Gloss gives us Gracie Spears, a mannish-looking young woman with a back-story. While Charlotte was at first a bit wary, she soon recognized that only another woman would be her true friend in this man's world she was visiting. That epiphany would stand her in good stead on the final leg of Charlotte's adventure, when she loses her way, both metaphorically and literally.
I won't spoil the story. Instead, I will say that reading the rest of the book made me feel deeply, often, and unexpectedly. The last 120 pages of Wild Life explore the meaning of life, the necessity (or not) of civilization, how to live, how to die, grieve, live in isolation, find community, and find our inner wild woman.

[melissabee · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is one of my top ten favorite books i own, and that's saying alot, as i have an obscene amount of books. i bought this at the gift shop in nepenthe (in big sur) on my way out to a 5-day solo backpacking trip in the ventana wilderness. that, and the fact that i have taken training in search and rescue, tracking, and wilderness survival made this book the perfect choice to take along on my own little adventure.

the setting is 1905, in the pacific northwest. the protagonist is charlotte, a widow and mother of 5 boys. she writes adventure novels, and scandalizes the town with her unladylike behavior of smoking cigars, wearing trousers, and riding a bicycle. charlotte's housekeeper melba, "who has failed to age well, and suffers from an unlovely overbite, as well as an unsympathetic nature," agrees to stay with charlotte's kids, while charlotte joins in the search for melba's granddaughter, who has gone missing in the woods. when charlotte herself gets lost, the book takes an unexpected, and fascinating turn.

gloss is a master at prose writing, and i was drawn in by the first few pages. once charlotte gets lost, it becomes an absolutely riveting tale. i could not put it down and finished it in two sittings.

[Zab · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's all about the prose, not the plot, with Molly Gloss, so if you're in the market for gorgeous sentences about the small towns and forests of the Pacific Northwest, definitely pick this book up.

This is not to say that things don't happen in the novel; the feisty yet pragmatic late-nineteenth-century pulp-novel-writing feminist protagonist leaves her brood of children and goes back to nature - way, WAY back - in the company of some creatures that I imagined as a cross between a Sasquatch and a kangaroo. Amazingly beautiful landscape descriptions can't prevent her journey from being a profound downer, and ultimately (in my opinion) not quite justified by the traumatic events that spur her on. Perhaps I'm just not this into wilderness survival tales or metaphors for the writing process.

Five stars for prose, two stars for making me like the heroine and then feel not only really anxious for, but ultimately disappointed in, her.

[Kara Clevinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her novel Wild Life, Molly Gloss manages to combine great storytelling with a strong message about wildlife conservation. Using the frame tale device, diary entries, character sketches, and short story excerpts, Gloss experiments with narrative form to present us with the formidable feminist and adventure authoress Charlotte Bridger Drummond, who, while in search of her housekeeper’s granddaughter Harriet in the Washington wilderness, becomes part of a Sasquatch family, truly living the wild life. The frame tale warns us that this could be made up, the early drafting of a novel, but Gloss prefers that to be ambiguous. And, ultimately, for her story, it does not matter if it is true or not. What matters is the suggestion that “we human beings seem no longer fitted for life in the wilderness—have been weakened by centuries of civilized life—but there may yet be something inherent in our natures, some potentiality which wants only the right circumstances to return us to the raw edge of Wilderness” (206). Gloss shows her Romantic colors throughout the novel: her Emersonian glorification of the wild, native man; her Thoreauvian appreciation of nature and lamentation of its loss in the name of human progress; and even the occasional Hawthorne-esque nod to the mysteries of humanity and the “unthinkable voids and immense wildernesses in the human heart” (241). Written in 1999, and set at the turn of the twentieth century, the novel argues that humanity is defined by conquering the wilderness; in fact, something of our humanity is lost with the loss of the wilderness.
Gloss also ties in this message with feminism, for it is the woman warrior whose humanity is redeemed by her journey into the wild. Using the framework of second-wave feminism, Gloss has Charlotte constantly proving herself, proving that she can do anything that a man can do. Men are unjustly violent: Harriet’s father is responsible for her murder as well as for sexually forcing himself on his wife; one of the young Sasquatch is shot and killed by a miner; and Charlotte is groped by a logger. In contrast, Charlotte, a widowed single mother of five boys, bonds with the Sasquatch family via the mother, suggesting that women’s maternal, caring, and empathetic natures will save nature. In a story of how “this country was tamed and hedged about, emptied of the last of its mysteries, and the connection between ourselves and the wild world irrevocably broken” (245), Gloss hints that feminism and women will redeem humanity and save the earth. I should clarify that I don’t think Gloss means to suggest that it will be through traditional feminine qualities (she presents cogent critiques of marriage as a barrier to women’s self-actualization, a popular feminist argument of the time period). Although the human and Sasquatch females bond as mothers, it is their “wildness” that is their greatest quality. Charlotte learns to feel and hear in the wild what she never had before; she develops a special affinity with nature and the creatures of it; she becomes a part of it.
One last piece of Gloss’s romanticism is her conviction that by losing the American wilderness, we will lose one of our greatest sources for storytelling and metaphor. “The Wild Man of the Woods strikes [Melba, Harriet’s grandmother] as altogether too near to the real, and consequently dreadful. It is a discredited feeling in civilized nations, but I believe we are all still afraid of the dark, and here in this land of dark forests the very air is imbued with such stories; indeed, the loggers had the tales first from the Indians. The realness of them is another matter. As the woods are daylighted, and wilderness gives way to modern advances in education and technology, I expect to see the end of the Wild Man, exactly as faeries and gnomes disappeared with the encroaching of the cities in Europe” (31). Without the mystery and depths of the forest, we lose the Wild Man, both figuratively and literally.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent work of literary historical fiction, set in Washington State in 1905. It is an epistolary novel, comprised primarily of the diary entries of one Charlotte Bridger Drummond, a fictional novelist inspired by real female writers of the period. Also included in its pages are some of Charlotte’s short stories and essays, as well as letters and newspaper clippings. It is all excellently-written, in a strong voice that reads authentically for the period.

When we first meet Charlotte, she is hard at work, juggling the demands of her five young sons with her writing. Though she lives on a remote farm along the Columbia River, Charlotte is drawn to the intellectual life, keeping up with world events and technological changes, and she does her best to shock her neighbors with her unorthodox opinions and masculine dress. She supports her family by writing pulp fiction, but also keeps abreast of the literary world, particularly the reception of women’s writing. She’s bold and independent, though she can also be insensitive and arrogant; in short, she’s a vibrant, flawed heroine whom I took to immediately.

But I was not altogether satisfied with the direction of the plot. (Warning: this review will discuss some events late in the book, but no more than all the blurbs do.) Charlotte becomes involved in a search for a child lost in the deepwoods, and gets lost herself, until, on the brink of starvation, she encounters a band of Sasquatch-like creatures. Or does she? – the opening pages invite the reader to question just how much of her tale is real. Usually I would find this suggestion off-putting, but oddly enough, it works here. What I liked less was the slightly sinister wilderness survival story that consumes the second half of the book; Charlotte is such a great character when rubbing up against her family and society – and her descriptions of her town and community are so strong and detailed – that sending her alone into the wilderness seems a bit of a waste. That said, Gloss deserves credit for telling a unique, genre-bending story, and I found it engaging throughout.

Aside from the diary, the additional pieces add a great deal of depth and resonance to the story. I loved Charlotte's musings on her reading and writing life, and identify with both her attraction to genre fiction and her skepticism about the literary quality of most such works. Her essays about gender, particularly in the literary world, were also a treat; Gloss states in her Author's Note that many of Charlotte's ideas were taken from the writings of real women at the time, but we still discuss these same issues today. I wasn't quite as taken by the short stories – those imagining the interior lives of people around her are perhaps supposed to make us a little uncomfortable, even while they reveal a degree of understanding that Charlotte rarely shows in her interactions with others – but they allow us to see the transformation in her writing after her journey, adding another dimension to the story.

In the end, I would absolutely recommend this book to those who enjoy literary fiction. It's clearly well-researched, bringing its setting to life, from the physical world of river and forest to the workings of turn-of-the-century logging camps. And it is very well-written, with believable characters, a unique plot, and a strong thematic exploration of the relationship between people and nature, ourselves and the unknown. I intend to read more of this author's work.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild Life is a historical fantasy, but one of those fantasy books with the right class of beautiful prose, thoughtful characterization, ambitious philosophical context, and disinterest in traditional genre storytelling that it gets classed as "literary fiction" instead. So while it is exactly the thing I'm always looking for, I feel lucky to have even come across it. In some respects, Wild Life is very similar to Birdbrain, which I found in the same list. The main plot is largely a descent from normal life into the extreme end of wilderness, where a mysterious and potentially hostile creature, whose traits are largely presented through excerpts punctuating the main plot, awaits. The comparison I think demonstrates how valuable side plots and side characters can be. What actually ends up happening is only slightly more complicated, and I don't think much longer either. But the presence and charisma of Charlotte's mind, navigating the whole world she lives in at the beginning of the story, provides a vastly more believable and interesting platform for what happens later than the back story scenes in Bird Brain.

Taking place on the frontier of logging country and near the beginning of the women's suffrage movement, Wild Life is very concerned with both environmental history and feminism, and delivers more or less satisfying takes on both. The epistolary format provides a great way to enrich simple scenes with reflection more self-conscious in retrospect than it might be in the moment, and with digressions on subjects that wouldn't necessarily feel natural to include during course of events. It does of course create a trade-off, emphasizing interiority and philosophy more than drama. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the evolution of how Charlotte's feminism expresses and understands itself. The environmentalist aspects are almost more interesting, though. Charlotte has lived so intimately with the utter destruction of the old-growth forests that, while it suffuses practically every page of the book, she never sees fit to comment on it, even after she has essentially experienced it firsthand as a victim. It is an ecological book and a feminist book, but it leaves the eco-feminist synthesis up to the reader (including one dangling contradiction that in another book might have been the "misbelief" Charlotte must overcome but here remains entirely unaddressed, largely to the book's benefit).

As these things go, I found the fantasy element pretty uninspiring. I have no inherent interest in Bigfoot mythology pretty much at all, and while the take here is not offensive, there isn't that much to it. It doesn't help that much of that section of the book is told hastily, because Charlotte is losing interest in writing in her diary. The mental shift it effects in her is profound, and it has a lot of relevance to other things that happen in the book, but it is ultimately pretty bland on its own terms. The meta-fictional element of including Charlotte's own novels about similar creatures is kind of cool, I guess, in so far as it provides an interesting oblique angle on her life with them.

[Melora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this. Gloss writes beautifully, and the Pacific Northwest setting and turn of the century period are very convincing, though occasionally it does feel as if she might have added in the historical detail with a lighter hand. Charlotte Bridger Drummond is a wonderfully memorable character – overconfident, arrogant, opinionated, and yet still, somehow, sympathetic – and Gloss's creative way of presenting her story, combining journal entries, literary quotations, and selections from Charlotte's “published” stories, is engaging. Towards the end of the book I'll admit that she lost me, when Charlotte has become one of the group, speaking their language, fearful of humans, and having no interest at all in returning to her children. I found her sudden understanding of the bigfoot language incredible enough, but soon after, when she is reluctantly returning to her children, when we learn she has only been living as a wild woman for six weeks, I was just (absurdly) annoyed with Gloss. Even if it was supposed to be some sort of Stockholm syndrome thing, six weeks and she's forgotten her four children and is singing in sasquatchese? Still, that's a tolerable flaw in an otherwise fine story, and Gloss absolutely redeemed it for me with the beautiful ending. The relationship between Charlotte and George, Horace, and the younger boys rang beautifully true for me, and I ended up very happy with the story.

This in not just an adventure tale, of course. Gloss looks at the relationship of women and men, mothers and children, wilderness and civilization, and so on. That part's good too, and thought provoking.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite novels has been reissued with a nifty new cover. Wild Life takes place in the Pacific Northwest during the early 1900's, and features Charlotte Bridger Drummond, a fearless and tough-as-nails, independent woman. When a little girl goes missing, Charlotte decides to join the search. Molly Gloss has written a beautiful tale with mythical elements, but that is firmly grounded in the reality of the logging camps and wild woods of the northwest frontier. Unforgettable.

[Aliki Ekaterini Chapple · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the loveliest books I've ever read, but if you're expecting sword-and-sorcery, or any of the typical fantasy themes, you'll be disappointed. This could almost be a historical novel, a rich, almost tactile, 19th Century travelogue of the Pacific Northwest's extensive wilderness. The fantastical part of this book is anything but escapist; it broke my heart. At the same time, it's lingered in my memory in a way few books have.

[Melinda · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the title that the King County library system has chosen as their official selection for the popular "If All Of Seattle Read the Same Book" program. I think that two of the main reasons they selected this book are that Washington is celebrating its 150th year of being a state, and Molly Gloss lives in nearby Portland.
This is a scattered and laborious tale of man-hating Charlotte who is raising 5 boys in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the (last) century. Charlotte is a pulp writer of romances who admires Jules Verne and despises the genre of books she writes. She does it for the money.

Charlotte is a "visionary" who envisions things like electric-powered washing machines and devices to fly in. Luckily, Ms. Gloss has a hundred-year perspective in which to make Charlotte seem smart and ahead of her time. Charlotte is one of the most mean-spirited heroines I have ever had the misfortune to meet. She enjoys freaking out the detested men she meets by wearing men's garb and chewing cigar butts, but making sure her lovely chestnut hair is always attractively arranged.

The most interesting part of the book is when Charlotte becomes lost and has a Sasquatch encounter. I'll give Ms. Gloss credit for that. However, when nearly struck by lightening she manages to save her precious diary, but neglects to remember her boots. Then, she spends 6 weeks lost in the muddy wilderness barefoot. And before that, she spends several nights in a tent with a bunch o'men, and woops! is (of course) molested.

The whole time she is lost she desperately desires to be back with her boys, but the author never goes into what they might have been thinking or feeling for all those long weeks. Plus, in a journal entry 3 years after her disappearance, she writes that she wishes she had more time to write, and that her family takes up way too much of her precious time.

She certainly didn't seem to learn much.

Also, the book is peppered with exhausting pages of irrelevant writings about people the reader has no relationship with, stories from magazines and a bunch of other drivel that I didn't care about.

The end result is a fragmented, confusing and incomplete story that takes too long to get off the ground, and then when it finally does, it's way too brief. I really disliked Charlotte, and I just couldn't get past that.

I suppose that some see Charlotte as the first feminist, but she is so grating that I had no sympathy for her. The only saving grace in the book is that what is happening in "real time" is written in regular font and has artwork by it that is supposed to resemble a frayed edge of paper, so the frustrated reader can skip past all the meaningless essays and get into the story. Then you can go back and read all the filler and find out that it's really not all that interesting.

[Felicity · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a strange book, but very good. Part of what it does, quite deliberately I believe, is change course several times. I knew about the fantastic element in the book before buying it -- that, along with having read some of Molly's other gorgeous writing, pretty much sold it to me -- but I think the publisher would have served the book better by giving it a cover that didn't code it so unambiguously as Western historical fiction. Its ambiguities are part of its loveliness, and should be celebrated instead of simplified away.

The story is told largely in diary entries by the 1900s adventure-writer protagonist, Charlotte, with interpolated articles and pieces of her published fiction. There are also interludes from other perspectives which I concluded were also written by Charlotte, and show a maturation in her insight and compassion that is, in its way, foreshadowing of the events of the book and their impact on her. In the early sections, before the plot ramps up, it's her voice that carries us along -- plucky and stubborn but also aware of her own failings and occasional ridiculousness. To a writer, female or not, her notes on and soul-searching about finding time for writing and negotiating your own literary ambitions will resonate.

Once Charlotte leaves on her quest -- to help find a lost child, which isn't a spoiler since it's mentioned on the first page's 'cover letter' -- some of the themes, like modernity and mechanization, start to come to the forefront. The landscape and equipment of 1900s logging in the Northwest United States is very interesting, and unfamiliar to most of us. Charlotte's self-conscious progressiveness and discomfort with primordial wildness becomes easy to understand in context when we see the vast taming action being carried out against the land.

As for the latter half, I'm unwilling to affect others' reading of it by going into much detail, but I will say that it follows a structure -- the deliberately paced, background-building plot that culminates in a transformative, lyrical journey -- that I enjoyed in Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, and it's equally hard-hitting and effective here. The climactic and concluding sections of the book kept me pressed to the page, wiping away tears. I felt my skin prickle with the sense of visiting, or being visited by, another world lost in and for our own.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in the first decade of the 1900s in the rural Pacific Northwest where the primary jobs of men were logging and fishing. Charlotte Bridger Drummond (C.B.D.) is the main character, trying to manage 5 boys and no husband, he either ran off or is dead. Charlotte has the help of Melba to keep the house and manage the children while C.B.D. writes. Her stories and novels bring in income to keep the household going, and presumably Charlotte’s sanity.

The book format is in the way of a diary, although not entirely chronological. Inserted are pieces of stories from C.B.D., snippets of poems or other quotes and the occasional newspaper clipping. These extra bits relate to the journal entry, with the result of it all not being too disruptive. I liked this unusual form for the novel, it provided a closer feel for our heroine that is quite a sharp character. For she does what she wants despite that women don’t or shouldn’t and is a devoted advocate for women being able to do anything a man might.

The action begins when Melba’s granddaughter goes missing in the deep woods, when the father takes the little Harriett with him to the logging camp where he works. Of course, this was a bad decision as logging camps are notoriously dangerous.

Charlotte cannot just stand by and wait for news, as she doesn’t think men will tell the women who wait the truth and full details of what has happened. Rumors are flying around with most saying Harriett was taken by a large hairy beast, what we call bigfoot, or sasquatch, among other names.
I didn’t like this book very much through much of it, Charlotte is a hard person and unlikeable. But it was also the style of writing, although I did like the format. But somewhere near the latter part of the book it changed, and my thoughts softened for the book.

It’s an embarrassment to admit this was given to me over twenty years ago and I finally just now read it. Also, the is the second book I recently read in which this is the case. (Let’s not mention the other gifted books I have lying around unread.) Hard to say how I would have approached this book back when I got it, but happy that I can finally say that yes, I have read it.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a treasure. It stands alone as a wild romp, but it also offers a wink-wink-nudge-nudge, poking fun at tropes. Many historical novels get the details right, but the tone and style of the writing is clunky or feels anachronistic; this one is perfect. The writing is gorgeous.

This is what a frontier book should be, beautifully and touchingly exploring how and where civilization bumps up against wilderness, asking questions about the difference between animal and human, wild and tamed, primitive and cultured, sound and language.

Charlotte sets off into the wild to find a lost girl, is lost herself, and returns home changed. And in a delicious little twist, the action of the novel is instigated by the dastardly deeds of a man named Homer. And instead of Odysseus leaving behind his son, Penelope, and her pack of suitors, Charlotte leaves behind a pack of sons and one suitor, a quiet man named Horace.

Of course, if you aren’t already sick to death of the whole masculine epic journey, stories of men becoming men in worlds populated solely by men with perhaps a few slutty and / or motherly (pick one) ladies thrown in—then this turning of the myth on its head perhaps might not give you the thrill it gave me.

I happened to read this shortly after finishing Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War, and in a fun little coincidence, both take place in the early years of 20th century, and both feature bicycle-riding, freethinking women named Charlotte. Simonson’s book is very different, more gently subversive in its exploration of the roles of men and women, and in it she teases out the meaning not of wildness and civility, but the machinery of war. Reading these two together was a happy accident, and has given me plenty to think about.

There were a few times that I felt we could move along more quickly, but as the mother of sons, there were two scenes right at the end involving Horace and Charlotte's oldest son, scenes that were so perfect and touching, I forgave her.

[Debbie T · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Molly Gloss's books. Her style is usually very simple and sparse; her stories about independent women dealing with the harsh life of the West. This book was different. It was still about a very independent woman--a writer and a widow with five sons. But the writing was much denser and more difficult to get through, the style of a writer from the early days of the twentieth century. The narrative was made up of the writer's journal, chapters of novels she was working on, and pieces of essays and quotes from the times. I didn't like the book at all at first and realized soon in that I had attempted to read it before and gave up. For some reason, I kept reading, thinking it would be memorable in some way. And it was. Charlotte (the writer) goes into the logging camps and woods of the Northwest to help look for the missing grandchild of her housekeeper. She gets lost herself while looking for the girl, and the last part of the book is about her survival in the wild and her adoption by a family of wild half-human beasts. She has to think about what humanity and culture really mean and whether she wants to stay with the beasts and the life she has come to know or go back to the civilization she has known before. The part where she was "rescued" was so moving. I must confess I did not understand the final chapter, which was from a book she was writing. I can't say that I liked the whole book but Charlotte's journeys--from civilized to wild and back--and her inner one, from a pretty smug person who liked to shock people just because she could to a woman who pondered the question of what it was to be truly human--was amazing.

[Kate Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is so much truth here; it would be worth reading for the feminist stances on marriage and work alone, and the strong, embodied, snarky tone in which it's delivered just makes it more resonant. I liked the protagonist immediately. And, as the plot progresses, we are able to see that men have more complexity than she believes, and that women may be performing for her as much as she is for them. That is to say: we see that she's as bound by the patriarchal rules that she pushes against as any other person.

I very much valued the moments that the narrator reflects on the burdens of writing and motherhood combined. She names so many of my fears of becoming a mother.

I love how utopia is not at all how she imagined it. That her experience of living in the mundane naturalness of the giants' life together contradicts everything she had set forth, exposing and subverting her own capitalist and patriarchal expectations. "Perhaps they ... have grown beyond poor Homo sapiens and understand the world well enough that they have no need to construct a civilization upon it." (p 206)

[Ann-Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Years ago I enjoyed this writer’s novel The Jump-Off Creek, which also brings to life the story of an unconventional woman living on the northwestern frontier. This book, however, is both quirkier and richer. I'm not sure at what point I fell in love with it, but it was well after the point by which I usually know whether I'm going to love something, and it came as a delightful surprise. The free-thinking main character, Charlotte Bridger Drummond, supports her five boys by writing adventure stories; nevertheless, it is her inner landscape that is so central to the story--it is as vivid as the primeval wilderness she becomes lost in and that is described so beautifully. And although she is a writer--and there is much about writing in the novel--it's also about experiences that transcend or surpass words.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore Molly Gloss's writing! I am particular about fiction writing - it has to get me early on or I move on.

Wild Life is historical fiction with a bit of fantasy (or not?), early feminist perspective with the internal struggles for mothers and creativity and a beautifully written natural history of the PNW.

Gloss's writing is gorgeous and the character's personality is developed and shines through the sentences.

If you are familiar with the PNW, specifically SW WA and the lower Columbia River, you will recognize the locations in the book. If you have hiked PNW forests, you will find your hiking while reading the descriptions of the flora and fauna.

No spoiler, but the story does ask you to think beyond what you perceive as possible.

[Susan Beecher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this somewhat unusual story of an unconventional widowed woman in coastal Washington state in the early 1900s who supports her family of 5 sons by writing popular novels. I don't want to spoil the plot but let's just say that she has an amazing adventure in the wilds.

[Jody · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked this book at first, but then I lost interest about halfway through and ended up just scanning the rest of it.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. This was an amazing book. Part feminist writer's manifesto, part love song to the Pacific Northwest, part indictment of (white) Homo sapiens and his effect on the planet.

[Viki · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book for tomboys and pioneers, for feminists and anyone who wants a historical peek of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century. Ms Gloss fills her book with hardworking people living in the sloughs and riverbanks along the coast and in logging towns, with adventurer's and lumbermen, with women laboring to make homes and find meaning in their daily struggles of building a life out west, and, oh yes, even Sashquatch.

Slow paced but intriguing,wonderous descriptions of the wilderness and the people who populated ut, I did not want to put the book down.

[Lori Brack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my life. The writing is exquisite, the story is full and important, the shape of the narrative is a revelation. I keep pressing it on other people, buy every copy I find at used book stores. For me, the melding of landscape, character, and possibility (it's hard to call this fantasy, I think) made me understand the potentials of fiction, and the poetic organization scheme pleases the part of me that wants art always, even when I also want a good story.

[Sasha Doyel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Storyline failed: There is no way a woman would forget about her children in such a little amount of time... years maybe.... within weeks.... never.... unless she was a horrible mother and she didn't sound like that. I love Molly Gloss' Hearts of Horses but the storyline in this book left a lot to be desired.

[Wendy · Rating 1 out of 5]

NEVER engaged me. I plodded through 70 pages and finally determined that this was never going to be the book for me. I didn't care for the form, I didn't care for the stories, none of the characters were of interest. I have liked other Molly Gloss books, but NOT this one. All of Seattle must have already been smoking MJ when they made this their city book.

[Joanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was evidence of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, and John Steinbeck. There was no evidence of an editor.