Wildheart

By Tyler Lee Buck

In a 1960s Montana timber town, eleven-year-old Wes Renner has learned to make himself small. At home there is a father who is only a voice through a thin trailer wall, and a mother too tired and too cornered to be the wall between them. So Wes climbs. Up the mountain behind the trailers is the one place the yelling cannot reach - and it is there, beside a half-frozen orphaned cub, that a lonely boy finds the first living thing that has ever been glad he came.

He names the bear Koda. He keeps it secret, the way he has learned to keep secret everything he loves, because in a town where every man owns a rifle, a grizzly is a dead grizzly. But a thing this large cannot be hidden forever - and when the whole valley turns toward the mountain with dogs and guns, Wes must decide what it truly means to love something he was never going to be able to keep.

Told in spare, luminous prose, Wildheart is a story about loneliness and the fierce, secret things a child will do to survive it - and a quiet, devastating turn you will want to read twice. For readers of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Pax, and Where the Red Fern Grows.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H6VSKBFF
• ISBN13: 9798184770659
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"