The Wild Inside

Raised in the uncompromising Alaskan wild, Tracy knows how to read animal tracks and keep the rules her mother left behind. After an attack in the woods leaves her with blood on her hands and a blank stretch of memory, a wounded stranger reappears and a quiet drifter named Jesse slides into her family's life. Pulled between protecting her father and confronting the dangerous possibility that she hurt the man who hurt her, Tracy must reckon with desire, guilt, and the thin edges between love and violence. Atmospheric and intimate, this taut novel moves between icy forest landscapes and domestic corners to ask how trust is rebuilt and how identity can emerge from trauma.

~ Included for its taut queer coming of age perspective, its portrait of found family in isolation, and the way longing and danger are braided together to question who we become after violence ~