Heartwood
'nearly impossible to put down' Jennifer Egan
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'Fast-paced and full of grace . . . a memorable meditation on the forms of care' SARAH MOSS
'An unforgettable treat' JANICE HALLETT
'An absolute must-read' ELIN HILDEBRAND
'One of my favourite recent reads' BARBARA KINGSOLVER, GUARDIAN
In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.
At the centre of the search is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who managing the search on the ground. While Beverly is searching, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie's disappearance may not be accidental.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman vanishes near Maine's 100-Mile Wilderness in this uneven literary thriller from Gaige (Sea Wife). At first, Gregory Bouras doesn't worry when his wife, Valerie, fails to meet him at a Maine trailhead for a scheduled resupply during her hike of the Appalachian Trail; she's been walking for three months now and has been routinely waylaid. After 24 hours without word, however, Gregory calls the authorities. Lt. Beverly Miller of the Maine Warden Service has led several dozen successful searches for off-course thru-hikers every year, but when a massive, multiday effort turns up no sign of Valerie, Bev fears the worst. Meanwhile, in a Connecticut retirement community, disabled septuagenarian Lena Kucharski learns of the search from a Mainer she met on a foraging subreddit who believes Valerie stumbled upon a secret military training facility. Gaige interweaves Bev's first-person narration with chapters from Lena's perspective, letters a lost Valerie writes to her mom, and transcripts of hotline tips and recorded interviews with people following the case. The preposterous, unfocused plot disappoints, but multifaceted characters and poetic prose enhance Gaige's tender meditations on aging and mother-daughter relationships. It's a mixed bag.
Customer Reviews
Not out of the woods yet
The author is an American creative writing academic and award winning novelist. This is her fourth.
Valerie, a 42-year-old white female nurse much traumatised by her work during Covid decides to walk the Appalachian Trail (AT), a 3500km mountain trek from Georgia to Maine said to be the world’s longest hiking trail. Bill Bryson wrote of it amusingly in ‘A Walk in the Woods’ (1998). This was made into a rather less amusing 2015 movie starring Robert Redford, and it’s fair to say few people walk the AT for laughs. Some get lost. Our gal makes it to Maine before she does.
The book is a series of intertwined narratives: (1) Valerie, in the form of letters to her mother, (2) Beverley the female Maine Game Warden in charge of the search, (3) Santo, an overweight gay Latino male who was Valerie’s “trail buddy” for part of the trek but is now back home in New York, and (4) Lena, a 76-year-old birdwatcher and would-be detective living in an assisted care facility in Connecticut, I.e., a long way away from the action.
The frequent changes of perspective make things seem like they’re moving forward, but they aren’t really. This is the sort of slow burn mystery that makes regular slow burn mysteries seem like Jason Bourne thrillers. It’s also about mothers and daughters, and Valerie’s’ relationship with her husband, and nature, and getting old, and… probably other stuff I missed. The prose is genuinely beautiful at times, the characterisation extremely detailed, but I found it hard to stick with because… Did I mention how slow it was? The Beverly sections were the only ones that showed any sign of advancing the plot, and then rather less than they might have, while how Lena is relevant to anything remains a complete mystery to me.