Book Synopsis
White Fang of Sunnybrook Farm and More Fracked Fictions
By Tony Arnold
What if the wildest wolf in American literature wandered straight into the sunniest farm in children's fiction — and neither ever recovered?
This audacious literary mashup grafts Jack London's savage frontier epic onto Kate Douglas Wiggin's beloved New England pastoral, and the collision is electric. When a half-tamed wolf-dog slips his collar in the California hills and drifts east into a hard New England winter, he finds not Judge Scott's veranda waiting for him, but a struggling farm, a starving valley, and a sharp-eyed, story-hungry girl named Rebecca who notices a footprint in the mud and refuses to let it go.
What follows is equal parts nature epic and coming-of-age idyll: a masterless pack forming in the frozen hills, a farming community pushed to its margins by loss and hunger, a small boy who looks into a killer's eyes and sees only loneliness, and a girl who walks out unarmed to meet a legend on its own terms. The prose moves fluidly between London's primal, blood-and-marrow intensity and Wiggin's warm, wry domestic charm — sentences that can turn from a wolf's ancient hunger to a hen's suspicious character in the same breath.
Part of the Fracked Fictions anthology series, this genre-splicing experiment asks a deceptively simple question — what happens when two classics share a valley? — and answers it with real teeth, real tenderness, and an ending that earns both. For readers who love: literary mashups, animal-and-child narratives, quietly devastating nature writing, and stories where the wild and the domestic refuse to stay on their own sides of the fence.