Category: Books

Heartwood, by Amity Gaige (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages)

“Any woodsman who says he’s never been lost in the woods is a liar. It’s inevitable,” says Maine game warden Beverly Miller in the opening pages of Heartwood, a new novel about a woman who goes missing while hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail.

“Up here, we tend to think of being lost as something you can be good at,” Beverly, who goes by Lt. Bev, explains. But for some people who get lost in the woods, panic sets in, and “loss of mental control is more dangerous than the lack of food or water.”

And with that, we are propelled headlong into the search for Valerie Gillis, the 42-year-old nurse who vanished about 200 miles from the terminus at Mt. Katahdin, where she was supposed to end her three-month trek. Valerie’s voice is present throughout the novel, however, in letters she is writing to her mother as she tries to stay alive in what’s known as the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, growing weaker by the day.

“The first thing I should say is that you were right. You didn’t want me to hike the Appalachian Trail,” she writes, acknowledging that a “thru-hike” — the insider’s term for walking the trail straight through — “isn’t a reasonable thing to do.”

“Anyone who wants to walk two thousand miles in a row does it because they find beauty in the unreasonable. All that misery, that’s the point. The high probability of failure, that’s motivation,” she writes.

Meanwhile, her parents and husband are part of a search effort that grows larger as each day passes, even as the odds of finding her alive drop as the days tick on. “Ninety-seven percent of the time, we find lost people within twenty-four hours. The other 3 percent, we know those stories like scripture,” Lt. Bev says.

The story unfolds, not only through the narration of the game warden leading the search effort, and Valerie’s letter, but also through the eyes of Lena Kucharski, a 76-year-old disabled resident of a retirement community who becomes something of an an internet sleuther, eager to help in the only way she can.

Interspersed throughout, we are introduced to people who met Valerie on the trail — members of her “tramily,” as AT hikers call each other — as well as various tips that are phoned in by psychics, do-gooders and other concerned people. While it’s assumed there has been some sort of accident that has befallen Valerie — maybe a bad fall or medical episode — there is also the concern that someone she came across in the woods harmed her, and or that even someone she knows was involved in her disappearance.

Meanwhile, we learn of a secretive facility near where Valerie disappeared, a real-life military operation identified by the acronym SERE — Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — which is training for members of the Armed Forces and civilian contractors who might one day be trapped behind enemy lines. It sounds like the stuff of video games, but a SERE facility exists in Rangeley, Maine, among other locations.

The story has good bones, for sure, but its heart is in the development of four characters:

– Valerie, who became a nurse to “fix things” but was exhausted by the challenges of caring for patients during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic; who had come to question her love for her husband while on the trail, where she assumed the name “Sparrow” while making new friends and writing quirky trail poetry like “Ode to My Spork.”

– Bev, one of only two female wardens in the state, an imposing 6 feet tall, but with a mother, now dying, who didn’t understand her daughter’s line of work: “It’s just so unusual. For a woman to want to drive around chasing criminals,” she’d said.

– Ruben, the 260-pound Black man who decided to hike the trail on a whim and became Valerie’s companion for a while and kept her laughing with his stories of trying to find hiking clothes and boots that fit, while also trying to fit in, so to speak, on the trail: “Man, do you have to be friendly when you are a Black man hiking. You have to start waving, like, a mile away. ‘Hey, ya’ll! Beautiful morning, innit?”

– And Lena, the lifelong voracious reader who lives alone in a retirement community, where she rebuffs the attention of other residents in favor of foraging for edible plants and chatting with an internet friend who goes by the name TerribleSilence.

Gaige gives all of these characters such warmth and depth that they could each hold up a novella on their own, but she weaves their stories together and manages to keep the tension thrumming until the last few pages.

As someone who has technically been on the Appalachian Trail but never felt the compulsion to actually hike it, I found this story compelling not only as a novel but in its ample nonfiction detail. Gaige, the author of four other novels, hung out with real-life game wardens in Maine and heard their stories while researching this book, and it is full of the language, customs and experiences of thru-hikers.

Gaige has said she has been long haunted by the story of a 66-year-old hiker who died of starvation and exposure after getting lost in Maine in 2013. There are similarities between that hiker’s story and the fictional Valerie Gillis’ — both started their trek in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (Valerie plans to complete the upper stretch, then the lower), and like the real hiker, Valerie is afraid of the dark and takes anxiety medication, making a terrible situation even worse.

In simple and sparse narration that blooms with lyrical descriptions of New England landscapes, Heartwood manages to be part mystery, part thriller, part how-to-hike-the-Appalachian-Trail guidebook — or it might convince you to never set foot in the woods again. Either way, start Heartwood and you’ll likely be a thru-reader, all the way to the end. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Heartwood, by Amity Gaige (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages)

How to Win at Travel, by Brian Kelly (Avid Reader Press, 304 pages)

It’s hard to say whether Brian Kelly really founded the travel website known as The Points Guy, or whether his father actually did, because it’s Kelly’s father who set him on this path. When Kelly was 12, his dad let him arrange the family’s vacation using points he’d accumulated from airlines and hotels, and a traveler influencer was born. Before he even had a driver’s license Kelly was hooked on the game: how to travel the world, in style and at minimal cost.

As an adult, he went on to start a website in order to share his strategies, and “The Points Guy” took off after he was featured in a New York Times article in 2011. Now Kelly is a dad himself, he’s sold the website, and he has compiled a couple of decades of travel wisdom into a book that arrives just in time to help navigate your summer vacation.

Kelly calls this the “platinum age of travel,” arguing that it’s never been cheaper and easier to go so many different places if you know what you’re doing. Problem is, he says, most people don’t — unless they travel a lot for business, or grew up in a family that had the resources to travel, most people have never learned to travel well — it’s not something that’s taught.

“You may think travel is horrible across the board, but it’s amazing when the system works for you. When I travel, I rarely wait in lines. I don’t pay for food and drinks in airports. You can do the same, and I’ll show you how,” he promises.

Kelly begins by inviting readers to decide on “travel goals” and to set a travel budget, which right away may lose him some readers whose travel budget allows a day trip to Worcester, Mass. There is a smattering of generic advice in this section, some of which seems obvious (“Stay at hotels if safety is a concern or if you’re traveling alone”), but some of which is surprising (he advises travelers to wear backpacks on your front in crowded areas lest a thief slice the bottom of your bag without you knowing it). There’s high season and low season for travel, but there’s also “shoulder” season, the bridge between the two that is often the best time to go. And so forth.

From there, Kelly organizes the book into how to win at different aspects of travel: booking, earning and redeeming rewards, accessing perks, navigating lines, traveling with family, staying healthy, dealing with problems that arise, and managing fear of flying.

Again, some of the information he shares is intuitive: Your odds of having a flight delayed or canceled are the lowest earliest in the morning, for example. The more prestigious airlines (read: Delta) are usually more reliable. Where he gets into the granular stuff is where it gets interesting, as in one of his tips for booking cheaper flights. If you are, for example, in Oklahoma City and want to go to Tokyo, he advises that you buy a ticket from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, and then book a separate flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo, thus (by his calculations) making the trip half of what it would have cost booking from Oklahoma City to Tokyo. This is a practice that travel junkies call repositioning flights.

The points and miles redemption chapters are where Kelly gets deep into the weeds, and readers will need to already have some knowledge of this game, or a burning desire to learn, or a couple of over-the-counter headache relief pills to keep up. He describes the machinations involved in getting the best values by accumulating points and moving them around and looking for “sweet spots” and planning “open-jaw” itineraries. (To be fair, Kelly does acknowledge, “If you’re a beginner, this chapter may get confusing.”)

Nor did I particularly enjoy reading about all the luxuries that all you people with access to airport lounges are enjoying while I’m waiting outside my gate. (You have showers? And buffets and VIP customer service?) I’m getting a bit grumpy at this point, I will acknowledge, since Kelly had promised me that I, too, could enjoy all the perks he’s enjoying, but he didn’t mention that I might need a Platinum Amex and elite status on Delta (which requires spending $28K a year).

As for easing the pain of lines, his advice is not novel (TSA PreCheck, CLEAR and Global Entry), and there have been reports lately of PreCheck lines being longer than regular since so many people have it, so that’s not even guaranteed to help.

Things get interesting again in the “flying with families” section because, despite having flown with four kids over two decades, I did not know that there is a debate over whether children should fly in first class (Kelly has done so) and that some people fly with “sorry gifts” to offer people who are upset by their crying or misbehaving children — like George and Amal Clooney, who once gave noise-canceling headphones to others seated near them on a flight. (Kelly’s against it — “Babies have a right to fly just like anyone else, and these types of gifts set an unnecessary precedent that we need gift packages to tolerate small humans.”)

Finally, Kelly offers some valuable nuggets on dealing with the inevitable problems, such as politely asking to be upgraded to first class on a flight to make up for the inconvenience if you are bumped from a flight or miss a connection because your flight was delayed. He also suggests contacting the airline via a DM on X if your flight is running late, asking them to “protect” you (hold a seat) on another flight in case you miss your connection. “Not all airlines will do this, but it never hurts to ask. Plus, asking to be protected makes you sound like a pro traveler and someone they want to keep happy as a customer.”

Kelly is a likeable guy who is enthusiastic about what he does, and he can make you think a little harder about how to improve the travel experience for you and your family. It’s unlikely that this book will overhaul the travel experience as promised for the casual traveler, and it feels a bit long for the amount of useful information gleaned. But at least those of us still without lounge access can save money by dispensing with the “sorry” gifts. B-

Featured Image: How to Win at Travel, by Brian Kelly

(Dutton, 235 pages)

Unless visiting all seven continents is on your bucket list, you probably don’t think a lot about the northern and southernmost parts of the planet. The Arctic and Antarctica make for a good documentary every couple of years (Antarctica: A Year on Ice and March of the Penguins come to mind) but then the subject retreats for most of us, ice usually confined to a rink or a drink. Not so for scientists like Neil Shubin who have spent years journeying to places with temperatures most rational people would rather avoid.

In Ends of the Earth, Shubin recounts his polar experiences, which began when he pitched a tent as a student with three other researchers in Greenland in 1988. Just staying alive in such an unforgiving landscape is a challenge, and when gear or equipment breaks there is no Amazon delivery.

And yet, “There is something almost magical about living in an environment where the sun never sets for a month or more while being disconnected from the rest of humanity,” Shubin writes. “Running streams exiting melting glaciers hold water so pure we drink it unfiltered from the source. Every babbling glacial brook could be a water fountain or, for extraordinarily hearty souls, a bath.” Isolated with a few others sharing the experience, “The world becomes small and intense.” Shubin isn’t a travel writer, but he might as well be, with the sheen he puts on the arctic experience.

The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 established that the continent, most of which is layer upon layer of ice, be used for scientific study; since then 29 countries have established 70 research bases, the most prominent of which is the U.S.-run McMurdo Station, where more than 1,000 people work during the summer, 300 in winter. (Fun fact: You can take a break from watching live panda or eagle cams and watch McMurdo cam on a government website, at least until Elon Musk finds out about it.)

There, one of the exercises new researchers experience early on is a “mock crevasse rescue” — highlighting that one of the dangers of living in this environment is falling into a practically invisible 200-foot crack in the ice. There are methods to pull people out, but still not everyone survives, and honestly, the photograph of a massive crevasse in this book is the stuff of nightmares for people who don’t enjoy being cold. Astonishingly, a member of Shubin’s team volunteered to be lowered into a crevasse so the group could practice a rescue, and he was so moved by the beauty of what he saw that “his shouts from 20 feet down were as if he was undergoing religious ecstasy.”

In fact, there seems to be a scientific ecstasy that permeates polar research with its out-of-this-world experiences and extraordinary sights, such as blue ice, ancient ice that looks like a “shiny version of an aquamarine” and which, when melted to drink, “means consuming water from snow that fell when Neanderthals roamed the Earth,” Shubin writes.

While the Arctic region is inhospitable to humans and most forms of flora and fauna we know, it has its own hardy life, including a tree called the Arctic willow, which instead of growing upward grows sideways and either atop the ground or below it. (Arctic leaf peepers will want to know that the leaves of this tree turn orange in August.)

And life in Antarctica includes cousins to New England’s woolly bear caterpillars, the fuzzy ones with the weather-predicting stripes. In the Arctic they spend most of their life frozen and awaken only for a few summer months to feed on willow leaves before freezing solid again. This cycle occurs for seven to 15 years, Shubin writes, until the caterpillar becomes a moth and lives out the rest of its short life: “Nearly a decade of freezing and thawing, feeding, and basking, all the while avoiding predators, is all in the service of two weeks of flying and mating.”

Shubin walks us through the science of how animals survive polar temperatures — and humans, too, including the story of a skier who had an accident that left her mostly submerged in ice for more than an hour. After she was cut from the ice, doctors were able to restart her heart at a hospital. She eventually made a full recovery. Shubin quotes a doctor who says, “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead” — miserable as it may be, cold often works in the service of life.

Scientists working in polar regions deal with the cold with a combination of high-tech clothing and purposeful exercise. “I’ll routinely do abdominal crunches when I get into my cold sleeping bag before going to sleep each night. The burst of activity makes for a cozy furnace inside,” Shubin writes.

It is asides like these that make Ends of the Earth mostly compelling even though Shubin, ever the scientist, at times teeters into AP science class mode. Now a professor at the University of Chicago, he comes by that naturally, yet his ability to make science engaging resulted in a PBS series based on his 2008 book Your Inner Fish. Credit Shubin, also, with the ability to write seriously about climate change in an apolitical manner. He is an observer, not a flamethrower, and yet wants all of us to consider what will happen as ocean levels rise up to 120 feet in the next few centuries. (There will be more wooly bear caterpillars for one thing.)

Shubin recalls the famous commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace in which the late author describes a fish asking another, “What is water?” In Ends of the Earth he invites us to consider what is ice other than an annoyance glazing our driveways. The answers are more complex than we might think. B —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Ends of the Earth, by Neil Shubin

Penitence, by Kristin Koval (Celadon, 320 pages)

If former lawyer Kristin Koval’s debut novel, Penitence, were a court case, it would be called Potential vs. Execution. The main storyline has great potential, the writing itself is solid, and I wanted to keep reading to see the resolutions to the plot and various subplots. But getting there was often a slow, meandering journey that weaved back and forth between timelines and third-person points of view — and the resolutions that I kept hoping to find as I made my way to the end of the book never came to fruition.
There are two families at the heart of this novel, the Sheehans and the Dumonts, whose lives have intertwined in various ways for decades. The matriarchs of each family used to be best friends, and their kids were high school sweethearts, until an accident mired in questionable decisions broke them all apart. Another tragedy, decades later, brings them back together.
The story begins in rural Colorado with the murder of a 14-year-old boy, Nico, dead at the hands of his 13-year-old sister, Nora. Their parents, Angie and David Sheehan, request legal help from local lawyer Martine Dumont, the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian — who works as a criminal defense attorney in New York City and agrees to help with the case as well. So he flies back to his hometown, where Angie has remained all this time. Lots of memories dedicated to each of their points of view of what happened “back then” ensue.
Does it feel like I glossed over the fratricide? That’s what reading Penitence felt like — this major crime was overshadowed by chapters devoted to Julian and Angie’s past and the years-ago incident that changed their lives forever. Those chapters, to me, felt repetitive and boring; I kept finding myself trying to rush through them to get back to that small matter of fratricide.
In that storyline, Nora is pretty much mute, which seems like a convenient way for Koval to avoid answering The Big Question: Why did Nora kill her brother? Instead, we get a little bit of speculation about that and a lot of extraneous characters and side stories.
Angie’s mom, Livia, for example — she’s not a likeable character in the “back then” storyline, and in the “now” storyline she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s and barely knows who anyone is. I understand that this mother-daughter relationship is a piece of the family-drama puzzle that Koval has put together, but like many of the subplots, it was given too much space.
Koval wants us to “consider whether the worst thing we’ve ever done is all that defines us,” according to the jacket blurb and the numerous references to that idea that are littered throughout the book. And I appreciate that she wove together several storylines that allow for contemplation of that question.
But oh my god, give me some closure. I wasn’t looking for a happily ever after here, but I did want an ending that made the read feel worthwhile; instead, I felt frustrated. This would actually be a great book club choice, as I imagine opinions and debates would be intense.
There is one twist in Penitence that I didn’t see coming, and that was the highlight for me. But a “suspenseful, addictive page-turner,” as it bills itself to be? I think that’s a bit misleading — perhaps I would have enjoyed the book more if I had been expecting the slow burn that it is. Or perhaps it would have been more of a suspenseful page-turner if more attention were given to Nora’s crime: her motive (I wanted so badly to get inside her head!), how her case played out in the court system and how it affected her parents.
Koval writes in the Acknowledgements that she thought fratricide might “provide the right framework for a novel about forgiveness,” and she’s right. David and Angie react very differently toward Nora after the murder — she is their daughter, but she killed their son. David turns toward her, while Angie turns away. It’s fascinating, thinking about how people might feel in that tragic situation.
I wish Koval had stuck more closely to this framework, that the book had been more singularly focused on that crime and the aftermath. Penitence had the potential to be great, but ultimately there’s just too much going on. C+ —Meghan Siegler

Featured Image: Penitence, by Kristin Koval

Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler (Knopf, 166 pages)

Anne Tyler is one of America’s most beloved writers, especially in Baltimore, where many of her novels are set. Six of her books, including The Accidental Tourist, were adapted for film, and she won a Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons in 1989. As such, it’s a bit surprising that her latest, Three Days in June, landed in February like an out-of-season beach read.

Not that it’s not a good beach read. But coming from the keyboard of Tyler, one expects a bit more.

Set (of course) in Baltimore, Three Days in June is about a divorced mom getting ready for the wedding of her 33-year-old daughter. Gail Baines is an assistant headmistress at a private school who has just been informed that her boss is retiring and that she, at 61, is not in line to succeed her because she lacks “people skills.”

As her boss tells her, “All I’m saying is, to head a private girls’ school you need tact. You need diplomacy. You need to avoid saying things like ‘Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realize your daughter doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton.”

When the boss suggests that Gail might want to leave the field and follow her dreams, Gail wonders what that would be: “I am not the kind of woman who dreams of doing things.” Nor is she the kind of woman who gets her hair done, or who moves on from an answering machine. When she goes to a hair salon the day before the wedding, she will only allow the hairdresser to “pouf it out” a little bit — “just something to show I tried.”

Gail had been married to Max, an affable underachiever eking out a living teaching at-risk teenagers, and living in a “one-room apartment above somebody’s garage.” He is “fond of recounting his dreams and they were always interminable.” It’s initially unclear why they are no longer married — they are friendly enough when Max shows up at Gail’s house unexpectedly, carrying a elderly foster cat and needing a place to stay, as their future son-in-law turns out to be deathly allergic to cats.

There’s soon one more complication when their daughter, Debbie, shows up, fresh off a pre-wedding “Day of Beauty” where she had inadvertently learned something terrible about the fiance that puts the wedding in question.

This is the point at which, were this plot in the hands of a less accomplished writer, we could sigh and say, “hijinks ensue” and be done with it. Tyler is too smooth a storyteller to let us go, however, and we are too pleasantly invested in Gail (and the foster cat) to leave them alone with a wedding on the brink.

For much of the book, Tyler gives us an entertaining and humorous look at the rituals surrounding an American wedding. When meeting, for example, the groom’s mother, we learn that everything she says is “three degrees too vivacious” — “It seemed that she lived on some other level than ours, someplace louder and more brightly lit.” And Gail and Max reflect upon the ridiculousness of the rehearsal ritual itself (the same thing happening the next day, with “fewer et ceteras” and fancier clothes). It’s a pleasure to read her witty observations on these slices of life.

As Tyler finally gets around to revealing why and how Gail and Max broke up — a story not unconnected to the present tension — she is a master storyteller at work. There is no one better at crafting dialogue that breathes life into characters and puts them in the room with the reader. There are no wasted words here, either coming from the characters or in the narrative. It may be a beach read in plot, but it’s a finely tuned one, with enough heart to justify its release in February. The conclusion, while not a shocker, doesn’t feel contrived.

It’s worth noting that Tyler is 83, and she could be sitting by the shore, enjoying her fame and the royalty checks from her 25 books. Three years ago, she told People magazine that “For several years I thought, ‘The world does not need another of my books.’ What if people are saying, the woman doesn’t know when to quit?’” She continues to write, she said, in part because “I’m not wildly social and I have no hobbies.” Her fans, and they are legion, hope that she doesn’t pick one up. B+