Wild Life

For those of us who are late catching up with the Oregon writer Molly Gloss, Saga Press is doing a great service this year by bringing much of her work back in handsome new paperbacks. Her books have been balanced between speculative fiction and stories of women in the historical West; Wild Life seems like it's firmly in the latter camp, set as it is in the logging territory of southwest Washington at the turn of the last century, but it takes a fantastic turn too (or a realistic one, depending on how you feel about the legends of the Sasquatch). The turn is subtle and thought-provoking but the book's real strengths are the vivid, exact details of her setting and, best of all, Gloss's heroine, Charlotte Bridger Drummond, a flamboyantly independent woman who manages to feel fully modern without seeming out of her time.