Alice, or The Wild Girl

In 1856, Lieutenant Henry Aaron Bird makes a startling discovery: a speechless, shipwrecked young girl, living a feral existence on a remote Pacific island. When he exhibits her as a “wild girl” in the chaotic sprawl of early San Francisco, this golden-haired child without a past will be seen by the populace as a scientific curiosity, a titillating image of female savagery, or, for many, a symbol of the unspoiled body of that young country. For Bird, she is a fragile ward in need of protection, whom he keeps drugged and confined when not using her to further his reputation. But Alice will rebel against Bird’s control, and set herself adrift once more in the surreal landscape of 19th century America—a place no less foreign to her than her own troubled past—where she’ll discover that the freedom she desires may have always been an illusion.

Alice, or The Wild Girl takes the reader on a voyage from French Polynesia to the terminus of the American frontier, as it charts the unlikely bond that develops between an aging US naval commander and the lost, damaged girl he attempts to “civilize” as a way of alleviating his own loneliness and ennui. Steeped in period detail and layered with fascinating thematic threads, Michael Robert Liska's bold tale examines existential questions about the nature of history, time, and identity, in a vanished America that is at once alien and strikingly like our own.