Naomi Alderman’s The Power meets Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists in Natalka Burian’s gripping debut novel following a young woman who learns how to harness a fierce new power to break free of her foster family and protect her son.
Like her foster siblings, Joanie can’t remember a time before living on the farm and tending to the Vine. The eldest at nineteen, she imagines more for herself. She had spent the previous year living with Mother Joseph, the powerful matriarch who employs her foster parents, and learned from her the addictive nature of the Vine and how it makes money for the family. But she also learned about its supernatural properties from reading journals left by Helena Joseph, the foremother who first discovered the Vine as a young girl.
After a secret pregnancy that she’s determined to keep from Mother Joseph, Joanie will do anything to escape the farm and prevent her son from the same cruelties she endured there growing up. But before she can make a run for it, her baby is kidnapped, she fears by Mother Joseph. The Vine, which can be controlled with the spells she learned from Helena Joseph’s journals, might be her only way to bring her baby back and finally gain independence over her life. But to harness its powers, she’ll have to go on a dark personal journey, pushing the boundaries of her strength to discover just what the Vine is capable of and how far she’s willing to go.
An extraordinary debut novel, Daughters of the Wild, explores the line between the natural world and the supernatural, and celebrates the power of female strength.
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“Daughters of the Wild is that rare thing, a gorgeously written and richly imagined page-turner that plows full speed across your heart. Writers like Karen Russell, Joy Williams, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez spring to mind, but Natalka Burian’s voice is her own: lyrical, spunky, and defiantly untamed. It’s a voice we’ll be reading for a long time to come.”
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Adam Wilson, author of Sensation Machines