Amity Gaige

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Heartwood takes you on a gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

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 show more battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut 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.

Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending,” (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is a redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What I liked about this read, which on its face is not one I would resonate positively with, is that we're not in doubt about Valerie's disappearance. We're reading her letters to her mom as the search for her unfolds. And yet it's a thriller...so how does Amity Gaige pull that off?

Deftly.

Honestly I'm still allergic to the Cult of Mother stuff...you'll have noticed an absence of any part of a fifth star...but the beautiful nature descriptions and the bleeding honesty of the toll that living in times celebrating dehumanizing "values" earned all four remaining stars. Leaving out the mother-daughter mealymouthing would've earned at least another half, just for Valerie's impressive if misused commitment to helping. Everyone, except herself...and how'd that little poison pill get in there. We do see that realization come to her. Her early-story-days burnout from nursing nursing nursing during COVID's worst days means she's in need of time to process and consolidate her new emotional world...that won't include the husband she does't love anymore, but who is her logistical support on this trip....

Beverly the Maine warden tasked with finding Valerie before her week's-worth of supplies runs out is, well, standard. She's a salty salt-of-the-earth supercompetent woman who throws herself into a job she's damned good at...to avoid dealing with her mother's steady decline into death. It's not like this is a groundbreaking idea. It is, however, very relatable; Beverly is rewarded and praised for the good work she does when other work must be neglected to do it. Work she does not want to do. "Women's work." Caring for her mother is...just too hard, given the older woman's dereliction of care for her, and effective devolution of care for Bev's sisters onto her too-young shoulders. Finding strangers who are a lot less competent than she is? Easy; and very much needed in the huge spaces that Maine has never "developed."

Lena is retired, lives a dull life of nothing much except chatting about birds to an unknown-in-meatspace mystery soul after her "useful" existence is done with her. She's sharp; she's savvy; she's got online skills that enable her to help Valerie and Beverly; so she does. I liked her best...I am her, I guess that won't surprise anyone that I think she's a good'un. She's estranged from her only child; she's difficult and spiky; and still can't resist doing something useful in despite of her physical disability. Yup. Thass me. The style of storytelling allows one to follow the developments, even Lena's, in the story's real time. It really worked on me.

How it all fits together is the fun of the read. I won't spoiler it because I am boot-quakingly afraid of the Spoiler Stasi. I'll say that misdirection я Amity. I had a firm opinion about where this was going and, when it got to the Big Reveal, I was correct. It gave me a lovely warm glow of satisfaction.

What makes this good Book Club Fiction™ is this mélange of traits, but most especially the dull mother-daughter conflicts. My own mother was awful; I do my goddamnedest to think around and past her gargoyle-statue-shaped lump in my head. But I've had decades of therapy and most of y'all ain't, so stories told about this feel better to you. I think Jenna Bush Hager picked a great iteration of the undistinguished, indistinguishable mass of Book Club Fiction™ to show y'all.

Buy one to say thank you to a talented author with her finger on The Pulse℠, and a celeb who's Book Club Fiction™ taste is solidly on the side of craft mastery instead of glam glitz and suchlike gubbins.

Not at all mad I read it. show less

Valerie Gillis, trail name Sparrow, is a 42-year-old nurse who spent the pandemic in the thick of it and emerged cracked open in ways she couldn't fix by staying still. So she set off to hike the entire Appalachian Trail — and now, just 200 miles from the finish line in the deep woods of Maine, she has vanished. The novel unfolds from three interlocking perspectives stitched together with tip-line transcripts, interviews, and newspaper clippings. There's Beverly, the tough, methodical show more Maine State Game Warden leading the search while quietly managing the news that her own mother is dying in hospice. There's Lena, a 76-year-old former scientist now in a Connecticut retirement community, who becomes an obsessive armchair detective following the case online — and who turns out to know more than anyone realizes. And there's Valerie herself, whose sections are written as poetic, desperate letters to her mother as she battles exposure and disorientation alone in the wilderness. The book is inspired by the real 2013 disappearance of Gerry Largay on the AT in Maine. Comparisons are to The God of the Woods and The Girls.

[May contain spoilers]
The question of whether Valerie's disappearance was accidental hangs over the whole book — her husband is quietly suspicious, and her trail companion Santo (a big, blunt guy from the Bronx who becomes a breakout character) is regarded with some suspicion too. Lena's role is the novel's slow-burn revelation — she has a painful history as a mother who controlled more than she loved, and her obsession with Valerie's case is tied to her own unresolved grief over her daughter Christine. The book maintains suspense about Valerie's fate until the very final chapters, and some details about what happened to her are only revealed to the reader — never to the search team. The ending is described as emotionally devastating but ultimately redemptive, soul-mending rather than bleak. It is much more a character study of three women and their mother-daughter wounds than a propulsive thriller, though reviewers who went in expecting literary fiction rather than genre thrills tended to love it more. show less

I am drawn to books that take place in forests, with tall trees that make humans seem small and inconsequential. Over the past year, we've escaped the Sonoran-Desert-heat-island of the city for the Ponderosa Pine forests of the high desert of Flagstaff, but it still isn't the old-growth forests my brain seems to crave: the oak and pine that transition to spruce and fir, the maple, the birch, the elm. I think it started with Braiding Sweetgrass in 2021, seeking something outside my own head show more and bigger than me. Even before I read that classic, I had Florence William's The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative on my shelf (purchased/started in 2019 but not finished until 2023). But Sweetgrass seems to be the catalyst and since then I've yearned for forests. The Overstory heightened my desire to be among the trees but overall I've read more books in the "nature" genre since 2021 than I have in my entire reading history tracked on The Storygraph (imported from Goodreads) which goes back over a decade.

So I picked up Heartwood because of the setting, the story was a wonderful bonus. Heartwood follows three women: 1) Sparrow (aka Valerie) worked as an RN during COVID and needs an escape, to find herself again, so she sets out on the Appalachian Trail; 2) Warden Beverly Miller, who is tasked with finding Sparrow when she goes missing; and 3) Lena, a woman living in a retirement community in Connecticut who loves to explore the outdoors with her friend Warren. The mystery of how Lena connects to Sparrow kept me reading, I was stumped when we suddenly left the search and Sparrow's letters to get to know this 70-something lady who is seemingly entirely unconnected to the Maine woods. It all comes together in the end.

It has the setting and missing person mystery of The God of the Woods combined with the reflections I like in nonfiction (think Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss and Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature . The setting is also similar to North Woods and there's the same sense of place-as-character in Heartwood. show less

When a person disappears, people search until they find the lost person—dead or alive. When the person is never found, that’s failure. Gaige uses the search for a missing person as a metaphor for the kind of loss of connection that frequently occurs within families. These losses are just as tragic but often no one ever searches for solutions, so they end in failure. Notwithstanding these realities, Gaige’s stories do end on hopeful notes.

Gaige uses three female protagonists in her show more novel. Valerie Gillis is a middle-aged nurse recovering from her horrific experience during the Covid pandemic by hiking the Appalachian Trail. Lt. Beverly Miller is at the end of a successful career finding lost people in the Maine woods as part of the Warden Service. She’s single and decidedly unfeminine. Lena Kucharski is an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman living a bland existence in a Connecticut assisted living facility. She is a retired scientist with an intense interest in foraging. Each of these women has relational problems: Valerie has grown distant from her devoted spouse and seems overly dependent on her mother; Bev’s mother is in hospice down in Massachusetts, but Bev refuses to take time off from her job to visit her; and Lena is estranged from her nurse daughter.

On its surface, the plot seems to be a run-of-the-mill search and rescue story where Valerie mysteriously disappears, and Bev leads a massive search to find her. All of the usual tropes are there including the suspense of time running out, overworked volunteers, and an abundance of conspiracy theories. Yet what makes this story compelling are the relationship problems that each protagonist faces. Initially these seem unrelated to the search plot, but Gaige cleverly weaves them into it.

In addition to the three protagonist voices, Gaige exploits transcripts from a tip line, newspaper accounts and interviews to embellish her story. Likewise, she evokes the threatening nature of the Maine woods and an off-limits SERE training sight to create a dark mood.

Her three main characters are nuanced, engaging, and believable. This is definitely a book about and for women. As good as she is with female characters, Gaige seems to stumble when it comes to the men in her story. They seem stereotypical and act primarily in a servant roles. Despite his function as Valerie’s sidekick, Santo is the only male character in the novel who seems believable and interesting.

In the final analysis, Gaige succeeds in giving her readers an engaging and suspenseful experience with an exciting search and three compelling characters. She brings the three plotlines together with a satisfying and surprising conclusion. Moreover, she ends with glimpses of hopeful futures for the three women. show less