Review: The Wild Inside by Jamey Bradbury

Title: The Wild Inside by Jamey Bradbury
Publisher: William Morrow
Genre: Contemporary, Paranormal
Length: 304 pages
Book Rating: C

Complimentary Review Copy Provided by Publisher Through Edelweiss

Summary:

A promising talent makes her electrifying debut with this unforgettable novel, set in the Alaskan wilderness, that is a fusion of psychological thriller and coming-of-age tale in the vein of Jennifer McMahon, Chris Bohjalian, and Mary Kubica.

A natural born trapper and hunter raised in the Alaskan wilderness, Tracy Petrikoff spends her days tracking animals and running with her dogs in the remote forests surrounding her family’s home. Though she feels safe in this untamed land, Tracy still follows her late mother’s rules: Never Lose Sight of the House. Never Come Home with Dirty Hands. And, above all else, Never Make a Person Bleed.

But these precautions aren’t enough to protect Tracy when a stranger attacks her in the woods and knocks her unconscious. The next day, she glimpses an eerily familiar man emerge from the tree line, gravely injured from a vicious knife wound—a wound from a hunting knife similar to the one she carries in her pocket. Was this the man who attacked her and did she almost kill him? With her memories of the events jumbled, Tracy can’t be sure.

Helping her father cope with her mother’s death and prepare for the approaching Iditarod, she doesn’t have time to think about what she may have done. Then a mysterious wanderer appears, looking for a job. Tracy senses that Jesse Goodwin is hiding something, but she can’t warn her father without explaining about the attack—or why she’s kept it to herself.

It soon becomes clear that something dangerous is going on . . . the way Jesse has wormed his way into the family . . . the threatening face of the stranger in a crowd . . . the boot-prints she finds at the forest’s edge.

Her family is in trouble. Will uncovering the truth protect them—or is the threat closer than Tracy suspects?

Review:

The Wild Inside by Jamey Bradbury is an unusual paranormal novel about a young woman who lives in Alaskan wilderness.

Seventeen year old Tracy Petrikoff loves the outdoors. She is an avid hunter with an unusual… proclivity for the animals she kills. Her family is heavily involved with dog sledding but following her mother’s death,  they struggle financially after her father gives up mushing and sells the majority of their sled dogs. Tracy keeps hoping to change his mind about her competing in upcoming mushing events, but after she is suspended from school for fighting, her dad grounds her from taking care of the remainder of their dogs and roaming the woods surrounding their home. Headstrong and stubborn, Tracy defies him to check her traps but on one of her outings, she is suddenly attacked by a stranger in the forest. When the man, Tom Hatch, shows up at her home not long after their encounter bleeding from a knife wound, Tracy is afraid she is responsible but her memories of their first meeting are somewhat vague.  After her father hires drifter Jesse Goodwin to work in exchange for board, Tracy befriends him and she soon discovers Jesse is hiding many secrets.

Tracy is the novel’s sole narrator and she is not exactly a likable or sympathetic protagonist. She is rather selfish, very impulsive and extremely defiant. She greatly misses her mother who completely understood her daughter’s need to hunt and freely roam the surrounding woods. Tracy inherited her mom’s abnormal need for hunting and ability to psychically connect to animals and people in the aftermath of quenching her bizarre appetite.

The book summary is a little misleading since there is no mention of a paranormal element to the storyline. While this aspect is not overpowering, it does factor heavily into the plot.  The hunting scenes are graphic but it is what Tracy does after the animals are dead that might make readers squirm.

While the novel is well-written, Tracy does speak have a bit of a backwoods dialect. A lack of quotations marks during conversations is rather irritating. The story’s setting is quite rustic and isolated but Jamey Bradbury’s descriptive prose makes it very easy to visualize the surrounding forest.

The Wild Inside is a slow-paced adventure that has unexpected supernatural/paranormal elements.  The suspense aspect of the plot is quite interesting  and Jesse is an intriguing addition to the cast of characters. However, Tracy makes such horrible decisions that she is unlikable and ultimately, irredeemable. A unique but very strange debut that is well researched and features a beautiful setting that is mish-mash of suspense, horror and paranormal genres.