Sarah O'Connor

“If someone looks out at the world…they should not be surprised if the world looks back,” (Leduc 61).

In 19th-century Scotland, Josiah MacDougal is banished to Siberia with a small Christian mission after claiming that animals can speak to him. While scrubbing the floor of the church one night, he is visited by God in animal form, two hyenas who tell him he is needed elsewhere. Once returned home, Josiah founds a religion where he believes that the hyena’s divine speech is a plan from God to heal and raised up the human race. But the hyenas, Barbara and Kendrith, are having second thoughts about Josiah and disappear and reappear throughout hundreds of years following the wind while animals around the world start to speak and free themselves, forcing humans to recognize the wildness within themselves.

I have been in such a reading rut and Wild Life has brought me out of it. What an amazing and, forgive the cheesiness, wild book!

There is so much that Leduc tackles here and she does it brilliantly. She examines what it means to be human, what it means to be animal, and if there is actually a difference between the two. She talks about the wildness of grief, the importance of it, and challenges the ways that spiritual and religious beliefs get warped by texts and preaching. In a novel that branches over a hundred years, Leduc expertly balances a variety of characters, their lives, and what being wild means to them.

My favourite thing about the novel is the normality of disabled protagonists and how disability is viewed and reacted to by other characters. One character is mute, another is suffering from inflammatory breast cancer, another is deaf, another is an amputee and neither of their lives are less than because of these illnesses or disabilities. My favourite, and probably most haunting, instant of this in the book is a deaf character who completely uproots her life much to the confusion of her parents and how they don’t understand her decision, how quite possibly her parents are so happy that she has found a partner despite being disabled that they ignore what may be happening behind closed doors.

I could write an essay about how beautiful this book is but I don’t want to spoil anything, it’s too wonderful and needs to be experienced. If you are ready to explore the wildness that lurks inside of you, then put Wild Life on your TBR!

Publication: March 11 2025
Publisher: Random House Canada
Pages: 317 pages (ARC)
Source: OLA
Genre: Fiction, Canadian, Magical Realism
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

In 19th-century Scotland, young Josiah is banished by his father for seeing the divine in the animals around him and sent to Siberia with a small Christian mission to purge such nonsense from his soul. Miserably scrubbing the chapel floor one night, Josiah is visited by what he thinks is God in animal form. When his saviours, a hyena and her mate, rescue him from a natural disaster that kills the other missionaries and then bring him safely home, he founds a religion based on his belief that God granted speech to the hyenas as part of a divine plan to heal and exalt the human race.
The hyena pair, Barbara and Kendrith, aren’t so sure that Josiah has it right. But with their beautiful strangeness, they utterly transform the people they encounter over succeeding generations. As Josiah’s church gathers adherents, more and more animals start to speak to humans—from signing baby gorillas to seductive alligators. At first one or two rebellious pets make a break for freedom, but then comes a mass exodus of all animals held captive, forcing people to contend with a wildness in themselves they have spent millennia denying. The end of this remarkable fairytale is both joyful and devastating, completely dissolving the boundary between what’s “human” and what’s “animal.”