Half Wild

June 13, 2016
With lush and loving attention to detail, MacArthur’s collection of 11 stories covers 40 years of life in rural Vermont. In “Maggie in the Trees,” a man looks back on a romance with a troubled, passionate woman, who also happens to be married to his best friend. In “Karmann,” perhaps the most memorable story, a teenager is in love with her best friend’s older brother, who is deployed in Vietnam. In “The Women Where I’m From,” a woman returns to her hometown to care for a sick mother and reunites tentatively with old friends. Loneliness, lost loves, dilapidated trailers, parties littered with empty beer cans, and women running through the woods all feature prominently throughout the book. Though the protagonists in each story are certainly different—hippies, farmers, young girls, old women—they can tend to blur together. Still, MacArthur is able to render complicated situations precisely and depict tenderness and harshness with an equally deft hand.

September 1, 2016

In MacArthur's polished debut, the women generally want up from the backwoods, even if their mothers have settled in and the men around them cling to forest and field from conviction or perhaps stasis and fear. Angel, who both loves and hates her hard-drinking mother, sees the fields stretching outward and thinks of walking. Katie, whose mom dreamed of being a poet in college but can't persuade her husband to bring in electricity, is just starting to rebel. After miscarriages and a wild affair with her husband's best friend, Maggie really does leave. So does Sally, saddened that her shiny new ways irritate her father and that she'll lose his "wild and unsettling hunger to go deeper, and deeper yet into the heart of the woods." But things don't get too sentimental; Cora is aghast at her sweet grandson's easy racism. VERDICT Complex and eminently satisfying stories of rural life; for all readers.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.