Heartwood

by Amity Gaige ★★★☆☆

"Here's what we know. On the morning of Monday, July 25, Valerie Gillis awoke early at Poplar Ridge shelter, said goodbye to two female southbound hikers with whom she bonded the night before, and continued her journey north. She had a cell phone and appropriate gear and supplies, and was in a fine mood. There's no cell service on that stretch of trail, but her husband was set to pick her up for resupply at a trailhead the following day. She was almost done with the northern portion of her hike. She smiled for a snapshot just as she turned to leave.

Then she vanished."

Lieutenant Beverly Miller of the Maine Warden Service is in charge of the search for Valerie. The story alternates between points of view: Lt. Bev's, snippets from Valerie's journal while she's trapped in the wilderness, and the occasional excerpt from a police interview with Valerie's hiking companion for most of her northern-half hike of the Appalachian Trail who goes by the trail name "Santo". Partway through, we're introduced to another character, Lena, a wheelchair-bound elderly woman living in an "Active Life Plan Community" for "adults fifty and over" who spends her days foraging and interacting with other foragers on Reddit.

The novel is tactically about finding Valerie before it's too late, but author Amity Gaige also regularly introduces commentary on human relationships in a variety of forms through building backstories for all of the featured characters. Mothers and daughters is a favorite topic, as seen through Valerie's letters to her own mother as well as Lena's strained relationships with her mother and her own daughter, and family dynamics play a significant role for all of the primary characters in the novel. The connections of strangers, be it Santo and Sparrow (Valerie's trail name) or the myriad of searchers who show up to help find a woman they have never met help demonstrate human connection on its most foundational level. It's all an attempt, I presume, to add some depth to the characters and poignancy to the tale, but it never quite lands. Or rather, it lands in fits and starts. There are moments of quality, but there are just as many moments of clunkiness, and an absence of true connection between the points makes it feel forced rather than fluid.

Ultimately, I think that inconsistency of execution is what sunk this down to a 3-star novel for me. It wasn't terrible, but it was a far cry from some of the more buttoned-up novels I read this year. The introduction of Lena feels forced, and a strange interplay with a SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance & Escape) training facility feels unnecessary. For all of the backstory we get on the characters, I had trouble connecting deeply with any of them, and that led to me reach a point where I didn't fully care about the outcome of the story. That's a bad place to be with a story that relies on maintaining tension around whether Valerie will be found in time (and how badly we care that she is found). When I juxtapose that disconnection with the way I was riveted to the outcome and latched on to the characters in Atmosphere—which I read just prior to this—it made the gap in execution more pronounced.

I was captivated by the premise and excited to read this one, particularly given my (possibly inflated) expectations after it was included among Amazon's Best Books of the Year So Far. It was fine, but unfortunately it missed the mark in too many places for me,