LOON is a psychological drama, a family saga spanning the distance between childhood trauma and the life and death reality of true recovery, and a perfect read for fans of The God of the Woods, Crow Talk, Where the Crawdads Sing, and old classics like Never Cry Wolf, or My Side of the Mountain. LOON chimes nicely with Richard Power's beautiful tale Bewilderment.

Matthew Fisher was eleven when his childhood ended on a lake in Northern Minnesota. One minute he was a sheltered kid with a patient father; the next, he was completely alone in the deep woods, forced to choose between paddling toward a surreptitiously troubled home or disappearing into the wild. He chose the wild.

By the time a seaplane pulled him off a backwater island weeks later, he wasn’t the same boy. The wild had taken root inside him.

Now he’s in Colorado, marooned in the quiet house of an uncle he barely knows, alongside Crawford, a boy tied to him only by mutual trauma and isolation. He's often found slipping backward, driven by guarded instincts that no one can decode.

Enter Dr. Althea Wright. She’s a clinical psychologist hired to analyze the Fisher family's wreckage and fix the damaged boy. She is supposed to keep a professional distance. Instead, Matthew’s misanthropic complexities trigger something volatile in her own hidden history. Her boundaries dissolve. She steps out from behind her clinical journals, drawn into an obsessive role as the self-appointed matriarch of this vulnerable, patchwork family.

James Scott Smith’s LOON offers no easy path to recovery. It causes you to wonder if a boy who has tasted total, lawless freedom can ever truly survive civilization—and whether Althea is saving this family, or just drowning in her own secret longings.

TAVA CREATIVE PRESS