Wild Angel

Wild Angel

This time, Murphy tells the ripsnorting tale of young Sarah, the Wild Angel of the Sierras. Sarah's parents were murdered, and she, only four years old, was left for dead in the wild mountains. But Sarah was rescued by a wolf who had lost her cubs, and accepted into the pack. There, against all odds, she thrived. Part Mowgli of the Jungle Books, part Tarzan of the Apes, Sarah's story is a delightful adventure for all ages.

When she is not writing science fiction, Pat Murphy writes for the Exploratorium, San Francisco's museum of science, art, and human perception. Pat Murphy's second novel, The Falling Woman, won the Nebula for best novel published in 1987. Her most recent previous novel is There and Back Again.

Though

Wild Angel

, Pat Murphy's frontier fantasy, deals with both wolves and westward expansion, readers of her lycanthrope novel Nadya should not expect a retread. This playful homage to the Tarzan books and American tall tales travels a lighter, more sparkling road.

Set in the California gold country between 1850 and 1863, the novel follows the adventures of Sarah McKensie, orphaned at age 3 by a stagecoach robber. Sarah is adopted and nursed by the she-wolf Wauna (who has lost her litter of pups to the same brutal man) and is accepted into the wolf pack. As she matures, Sarah learns to assist in the pack's well-being by contributing human tools--a found knife, a bow and arrow, and a lariat stolen from a would-be cowpoke--to the hunt.

With her best friend and pack-sister Beka at her side, Sarah becomes a local legend--the Wild Angel of the Sierras, rescuer of imperiled travelers. Sarah's altruism is motivated less by compassion than by curiosity, bafflement by the settlers' inability to perceive the world around them, and a passion for biscuits.

Surrounding Sarah is a kaleidoscopic cast: an artist with a shady past; a young Indian shaman; a mesmerist-cum-temperance crusader; a circus impresario with a pack of poodles and an elephant named Ruby; a young woman on the lam from her strait-laced aunt; the hilarious fraternal order E Clampus Vitus (or "Clampers"); Samuel Clemens (in a brief and thwarted cameo); and, of course, two hiss-worthy villains--one human, one lupine.

Throughout this tale of coincidence, chance reunions, heroism, villainy, romance, revenge, and adventure, Murphy weaves deft comedic touches--including Sarah's unforgettable improvisation during a staging of "The Drunkard." Even the one continuity blip near the end of the novel reads not as authorial carelessness but as a knowing wink to the plot-and-character-juggling serial writers of the past.

Murphy has written

Wild Angel

as a novel by alter-ego/imaginary friend Max Merriwell written as Mary Maxwell. The conceit isn't necessary for enjoyment of the novel, but the three explanatory afterwords, by Maxwell, Merriwell, and Murphy, are pure jam.

Before embarking upon this delightful novel, readers would be well advised to check their realism at the door and adopt the motto of the Clampers--Credo Quia Absurdum, "I believe because it is absurd." --Eddy Avery









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