Into the Jungle
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
In this “hypnotic, violent, unsparing” (A.J. Banner, USA TODAY bestselling author) thriller from the author of the “haunting, twisting thrill ride” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author) The River at Night, a young woman leaves behind everything she knows to take on the Bolivian jungle, but her excursion abroad quickly turns into a fight for her life.
Lily Bushwold thought she’d found the antidote to endless foster care and group homes: a gig teaching English in Cochabamba, Bolivia. As soon as she could steal enough cash for the plane, she was on it.
But the program was a scam. And bonding with other broke, rudderless girls in the local youth hostel wasn’t the answer. Falling crazy in love with Omar, a savvy, handsome local who’d left his life as a hunter in Ayachero—a remote jungle village—to try city life: this was the last thing Lily could have imagined.
When Omar learns that a jaguar had killed his four-year-old nephew in Ayachero, he gives Lily a choice: stay alone in the unforgiving city, or travel to the last in the ever-more-isolated string of river towns in the jungles of Bolivia. Thirty-foot anacondas? Puppy-sized spiders? Vengeful shamans with unspeakable powers? None of it matters to love-struck Lily. She follows Omar to a ruthless new world of lawless poachers, bullheaded missionaries, and desperate indigenous tribes driven to the brink of extinction. To survive, Lily must navigate the jungle—and all its residents—using only her wits and resilience.
“Gripping, breathtaking, and exquisitely told—Into the Jungle pulls you into another world, returning you forever transformed” (Wendy Walker, USA TODAY bestselling author).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When the teaching job that lures scrappy 19-year-old foster care survivor Lily Bushwold, the narrator of this ferocious fever dream of a thriller from Ferencik (The River at Night), from Boston to Cochabamba, Bolivia, falls through, she decides to stay on. In Cochabamba, Lily falls hard for handsome mechanic Omar, and then, through the stories he tells, for the remote Amazonian jungle where his clan has lived for seven generations. So when Omar's brother Panchito arrives from Ayachero, the tiny village Omar left years earlier, to ask Omar to return to lead the hunt for the jaguar that has killed their four-year-old nephew, Lily begs to go with him pythons, tarantulas, and menacing neighboring Tatinga tribe be damned. And that's not the half of it, Lily discovers once in Ayachero. Despite Lily's fluent Spanish, Omar's family and friends are none too welcoming to a gringa lacking any discernible skills to help a struggling community squeezed between ruthless poachers and the Tatinga. Ferencik delivers an alternately terrifying and exhilarating tale.
