Last year I read Charlotte McConaghy's debut novel Migrations which I absolutely loved. Her new novel Once There Were Wolves deals with similar themes of ecological destruction and a young woman determined to restore the balance of nature. I also found it darker, more suspenseful, delving into the basic questions of human nature.
The opening sentence is horrific, an introduction into Inti's experience of mirror-touch synesthesia, and throughout the novel this device takes readers into the physical experience of violence, and also love.
Inti and her twin Aggie grew up with separated parents, their mother a cop in Australia while their father lived a sustainable life in Canada. Their dad taught them how to live in harmony with nature. Their mother taught them that every person is a potential threat.
Inti has a condition in which she can feel in her body what she
observes happening to others. When Aggie marries a man who abuses her, and Inti does what she must to protect her sister. Aggie never recovers.
The Scottish ecosystem in crisis, with deer destroying the vegetation, Itni is part of a team reintroducing the deer's natural predator--wolves. It had worked in Yellowstone National Park. If you want to save the planet, you have to start with the predators, Inti explains.
They want to fear the wolves because we don't want to fear each other.~from Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
The Scots hunted out the wolves hundreds of years ago to protect their grazing sheep and out of fear. But Inti knows that humans are the real killers. Even in remote Scotland, Aggie lives in terror.
Inti and the local cop Duncan begin an affair; both are damaged souls with dark secrets. "Death gets under your skin," Duncan says; "you carry it with you." Like Inti, he has seen the violence men can inflict on women.
Inti makes enemies as she clashes with the locals over the wolves. When one goes missing, the wolves are suspect. And over time, Inti and the cop Duncan are also implicated.
The wolves must kill to survive. And sometimes, humans must do the same.
McConaghy's vivid descriptions bring to life the beauty of nature and the wolves, and the destruction humans inflict on nature and each other.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
Once There Were Wolves
by Charlotte McConaghy
Flatiron Books
Pub Date: August 3, 2021
ISBN: 9781250244147
hardcover $27.99 (USD)
from the publisher
From the author of the beloved national bestseller Migrations, a #1 IndieNext pick, a gorgeous and pulse-pounding new novel set in the wild Scottish Highlands.Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team of biologists tasked with reintroducing fourteen gray wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie, too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove the sisters out of Alaska.Inti is not the woman she once was, either, changed by the harm she’s witnessed—inflicted by humans on both the wild and each other. Yet as the wolves surprise everyone by thriving, Inti begins to let her guard down, even opening herself up to the possibility of love. But when a farmer is found dead, Inti knows where the town will lay blame. Unable to accept her wolves could be responsible, Inti makes a reckless decision to protect them. But if the wolves didn’t make the kill, then who did? And what will Inti do when the man she is falling for seems to be the prime suspect?Propulsive and spell-binding, Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves is the unforgettable story of a woman desperate to save the creatures she loves—if she isn’t consumed by a wild that was once her refuge.
