WildEye

Denise Dahn set her first novel in Washington’s Cascade foothills. She knows the difference between rain that’s atmospheric and rain that’s just wet. Izzie is seventeen. Her military parents ship her off to live with a great-aunt and great-uncle at a subdivision called Greystone Manor. She spends her first chapters resenting a place built around a glacial erratic the developers couldn’t blast loose. That boulder came down from Canada and dropped here ten thousand years ago. Now it’s a marketing gimmick with a punning slogan. It’s the book’s best joke and its clearest thesis. Nothing here got here by accident.

Dahn grew up running the hills of Okanogan County. She writes the region without flattening it into evergreen wallpaper. Funnel cakes at the farmers market. A family the town first dismissed as “whacko hippies from California.” A girl selling pickles made from whatever her mom finds in the woods. This is Cascade foothills texture, not tourist-board Seattle.

Where the book earns its keep is underground. Izzie and four friends get pulled into an old-growth wilderness. Dahn spends pages inside a mycorrhizal network. The threads have no brain. They run “as a network, by the network, and for the network,” trading sugar for shelter with a Douglas fir. It’s speculative, not textbook mycology. But it’s rendered with patience and specificity. The forest stops being scenery. It starts acting like a character with its own metabolism and its own opinions.

A prologue set in the 1936 Amazon shows a healer weighing whether to save a dying colonizer. It sets up a colonial reckoning. The present-day plot never returns to it with the same weight. A homeroom teacher gives a cringing speech about Izzie’s “mixed-ethnicity” background. It reads like satire of a well-meaning adult, not commentary Dahn wants to develop.

The romance is the novel’s stranger swing. Izzie falls for Jack, a Depression-era boy. She meets him through his diary, then in the flesh. The book takes its time explaining the gap between them. It stays chaste and slow-building, more ache than heat, which suits a story marketed as clean YA. The payoff lands on a kept pendant and a rainstorm, not a scene. Some readers will find that moving. Others will find it undercooked.

Dahn’s illustrations, done in Adobe Fresco, do quiet work the prose doesn’t need. The dialogue over-explains what the pictures and the mycelium already showed. WildEye builds its own myth out of lichen, glacial rock, and a strange romance. It’s more curious and more specific than the shelf it’s competing on. WildEye is a first novel with root problems worth forgiving, because the roots are what it does best.