Wolves of Winter

Lynn McBride's guide to surviving in the Yukon: Step 1. Forget about life in Alaska. Don't think about microwaves, pizza, chocolate, movies, summer, the flu pandemic, or your dad--his sunken eyes, frail knuckles. That world's gone. Move on. You're a survivor. Step 2. Learn to hunt, gut, clean, and cook animals without ralfing. Step 3. Learn to live with the cold, the uncomfortable cabins, and the snow, snow, and more snow. Step 4. Protect what's left of your family. Even if it means travelling with a stranger into the frozen north to help find and kill a man you know nothing about. Step 5. Trust no one. Narrated by Lynn, a 23-year-old who was 12 when war and flu struck and she, her uncle, mother and brother left their town in Alaska for the remote Yukon territory. Since then she's grown up in isolation, a surly neighbour 3 miles away the only human contact outside her family. When she runs into a stranger and his dog while out hunting one day everything changes. Jax stays with them while recovering from an injury and when, a week later, a group of 4 men show up looking for him he kills three of them and runs off to catch the 4th before he can bring more men back. Lynn and her uncle Jeryl go with him and Jax explains that they are bad men who want to run experiments on him because of his superhuman strength. Their eventual confrontation with the group of men changes their small family outpost forever.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Science Fiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.