Alice, or the Wild Girl by Michael Robert Liska Reviewed by Kazuo Robinson

Alice, or the Wild Girl by Michael Robert Liska

Reviewer: Kazuo Robinson

Publisher: Heresy Press

Publication Date: September 9, 2025

ISBN: 9781949846720

Pages: 408

“Never love a wild thing,” Holly Golightly advises. Because “you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky.” This is the problem examined at length in Michael Robert Liska’s debut novel. With Alice, or the Wild Girl, he has built an expansive historical tale around a fabular hypothetical. In the novel’s imagining, a girl named Alice Kelly is discovered by the American navy on a small island in the South Pacific in 1856, having been orphaned and stranded there on her way from Boston to San Francisco. Lieutenant Henry Aaron Bird takes her into his care, or, as others might see it, takes her captive. She is mad and close enough to savage that she must be pacified with laudanum, though she is coaxed sometimes into speaking and remembering her American past. Through storms and adventures on other islands, she is brought back to Portsmouth, Virginia, where much interest awaits her. Billed as the “female Robinson Crusoe”, she is taken on tour by Bird, and they settle in San Francisco, where an extravagant musical based roughly on her life makes her yet more famous. Bird enjoys his own career as a celebrity while keeping her locked up, because she can be shown around but can’t behave among polite grown-ups. Inevitably, she resents this. Encouraged by the examples of women that Bird would never approve as role models, she decides to do her own thing.

After adjusting to Liska’s narration, which in trying to compromise with the 19th century comes out somewhat stilted, readers will find much to enjoy. The seafaring is dramatic, hectic, and lively, the legal interlude in Portsmouth is amusing, and the final San Franciscan setting is excellently detailed, even immersive. Bird must have been a difficult feat as a character, as he lacks charm and is only occasionally admirable, but the author has managed it, so the father figure earns much interest. Alice, though some chapters do switch to her perspective, is more distanced, because she has more of the exceptional and the visionary about her, and of course takes on more thematic baggage as a study in nature and nurture, convention and idiosyncrasy. The relationship is not treated with any sentimentality. This is not to say that there is no feeling, but that one has to find it where one can, in the quiet between chapters, or gradually, in the proof given by action. Liska relishes the fantastic and dramatic in composing his story, then trusts it and does not push it too hard. The scope is considerable, and the research provides the weight of the epochal (the end of maritime exploration, the beginning of the end of the American frontier). This grandeur may be old fashioned, but the novel’s ends, or their ambiguity, are contemporary, having more to do with mood than meaning.  

Alice, or The Wild Girl is rather wistful. Inserts from historical writings on Alice remind us that this was all long ago: “the logbook of the Fredonia provides the first surviving documentation establishing her existence”. Her reflections are on what she has lost, which after her travels feels very distant. A curious simile invites melancholy into otherwise neutral scenes: “The first and only time the girl dared to approach him as he stood at the wheel, the sailing master had only turned to scowl slightly, like a man who’d just noticed his wallpaper peeling.” Deeper pain threatens: if Bird’s story is pathetic, that of the devout, talented Lieutenant Rand, who also cares for Alice, is more pointedly poignant. But any suggestion of intense, desperate sadness is muted when Liska writes Alice’s perspective, because she is understanding her own life in limited terms, and is kept most of the time in an opioid haze. The wooliness of her perception is to help Liska keep the sharp edges of the narrative from being felt too keenly, though her inability to experience tragedy is of course its own kind of tragedy. 

What is visible and vivid is the multifarious human life around Alice, and her strangeness makes her an eager observer. Arriving in San Francisco, which at the end of the gold rush is a new city built at outrageous speed, she sees the madness of a man’s world which unlike the navy has no strict hierarchy: “Now, through every open saloon door, she could see more men, roomfuls of them, table after table surrounded by men, counters lined with men. Men in neat suits and others dressed like farmers, side by side, and almost all of them smoking.” There is money to be made here. Bird and Alice have been lured here by an appointment with the dramatist J. Galloway. The shoddy chicanery that Liska will send up as he follows Bird and Alice into showbusiness is no surprise, but the account of the production on opening night, with its elaborate stage effects and ludicrous plotting, is a comic high. The play within the novel reminds us of the baffled knight’s and squire’s discovery in the Second Part of Don Quixote that they have entered folklore. Alice’s inability to quite understand and accept such artifice is quixotic, part of a larger problem, that she is not sure where fiction ends and reality begins. She and Bird do notice how Galloway has improved her story for the public, giving it a better romantic angle, a villain to blame, and a triumphant ending. The theatrical distortion, i.e. what the novel could have been, clues us into what it actually is as we read, and broadens our view of how the basic premise could have been developed. The author gives the road not taken, with its revels and easy satisfactions, its due. But the characters, dimly aware and upset, are trapped somewhere between the story they’re in and the version others are telling.  

Liska has nested tragedies within tragedies. His Alice has Sister Carrie’s implacable nature, whether she was born that way or formed and hardened, but she will not be streaking across the night sky in her well-paid glory. Her wildness calls her back to the island, where all was quiet, rather than propelling her out of the mass of mediocrity, though striving, in the novel’s view, doesn’t seem to make anyone any happier. Lieutenant Henry Aaron Bird is a fine creation, peevish, jealous, affectionate, finally honorable in defeat. Faced with his choices and their consequences, he is more like someone we have met or will meet someday, maybe not stuck in fiction after all. She and he do not live quite on the same plane, and this gives the novel its curious, whimsical humor, and perhaps its most upsetting implication. (The odd couple may not be made for each other.) The consolations will not be found in the ending, but maybe someday in a second reading, as one takes note of the moments in which they briefly hold hands across the difference. Alice, or The Wild Girl is affecting and effective because it knows how to make much of this gesture. 

Michael Robert Liska is an American novelist. His work has been published in Forever Magazine and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He co-hosts the Shakespeare podcast What Ho…A Rat!!

Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His reviews have been published in The New Criterion, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Oxonian Review, and he runs a Substack, On Fiction, at kazuorobinson.substack.com. 

6 May 2026