A review by tasharobinson
What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine

3.0

I can see the skill that went into this; the prose is very pretty and poetic, and the main character is drawn with impressive depth and detail. But I had the hardest time connecting to it! So much of the early going is spent on chapters introducing tragic dead female characters who wind up having virtually no impact on the plot, and even just disappearing in the end. And the center of the book is a big fantasy-mystery that just goes on and on and is finally explained at the very end, in a way that finally makes the pieces fall together, but didn't feel satisfying after hundreds of pages of "I don't know what this creature we're spending so much time with actually is, or how it's relevant to the story or the protagonist." I tend to think this would have worked a lot better if we'd known what the protagonist's doppleganger in the woods was to start with and could have understood the building threat and the establishing metaphor, instead of having so much of the book be about watching very detailed descriptions of things we aren't meant to understand or be able to place in reality.