Dear Thorns

For fans of Dana Spiotta’s Wayward and Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies we follow Lora, a wildlife refuge worker in South Texas who gets tangled up in a romantic relationship with a much younger male intern.

Lora has worked at the wildlife refuge in South Texas for seven years, trapping and studying the elusive Texas ocelot. Interns come and go, but when Ben arrives, something is awakened in Lora that has long been dormant.

As Lora and Ben track the beautiful, almost mystical animal, the reader learns about Lora’s professional and romantic history; a characters study of a woman frequently choosing the professional over the personal. Through her relationship with Ben, Lora discovers much about herself. And through Lora and Ben’s work at the refuge, the reader learns much about the Texas ranchlands just above the Mexico border and the species—animal, plant, and human—that inhabit it.

With incisive prose and great humor, Karen Olsson’s Dear Thorns mines the massive gulf between youth and middle age and the frustrations and inefficiencies of government and bureaucracy, and reckons with the ecological disaster of species loss. With a subtle hand, she shows the reader how the things we do to wild animals—isolating them, reducing their habitats, disconnecting them from other groups—are all things we seem to do to ourselves.