ALICE, OR THE WILD GIRL

A Navy officer parlays the discovery of an island castaway into a 19th-century roadshow in Liska’s debut historical novel.

The Pacific Ocean, 1856: At this late point in his career, Lt. Henry Aaron Bird would love to discover something not yet known, so when the USS Fredonia stops to gather water at a small island unmarked on the ship’s charts, he goes ashore in the hope that he might be the first man ever to set foot on this virgin land. Instead, he discovers the island is already occupied by a small, naked, girl of European stock. “Her lips were curled in a snarl and she made a frightened, unintelligible hissing noise,” observes Bird. “Blonde hair, bleached nearly white, hung in thick dirty clumps over the burnt edges of her scalp.” The girl does not speak, but graves elsewhere on the island suggest she is the last of a group of shipwrecked travelers. The ship’s surgeon dismisses the girl as an idiot, but Bird, though not formally educated, can tell she is not. Following the controversial death of another officer, Bird gains control of the girl—who eventually reveals that her name is Alice Kelly—and, following the end of the voyage, turns her into a traveling exhibit, “The Wild Girl of the Pacific.” As Alice confronts her traumatic past and Bird settles into his newfound prominence, both discover that America is a much stranger, harder place than Alice’s desert island. Liska’s prose captures a country that feels equally alien to the reader and to Alice herself: “The stage was just high enough that she could look out and see them all at once, a sea of heads and astonishing hats. When she was not on a stage, most people towered above her; she felt lost in a dark forest of moving figures.” The story largely eschews the sensationalism of Alice’s stage show, unfolding slowly to gradually reveal twin portraits of Americans lost in their second acts. Steeped in loneliness and 19th-century grandeur, the novel is a remarkable meditation on our unlikely migrations through space and time.

A rich and memorable story of exploitation and reinvention.