Category: Books

How to Be Well, by Amy Larocca (Knopf, 291 pages)

At some undefined point between Helen Gurley Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow, women stopped the pursuit of beauty and replaced it with the pursuit of “wellness.” Wellness is an ill-defined concept, a mixture of good health (mental and physical), good vibes and excellent self-esteem, with the goal of becoming The Best Version of You, as the parlance goes. It is a $5.5 trillion dollar industry according to the Global Wellness Institute, encompassing far more than the pursuit of beauty ever did. (Have you checked the price of collagen peptides lately?)

It is also poorly regulated, and as such, women are subject to a barrage of dubious claims about procedures and products that are said to make them ever more well, while in fact the only certainty is that they will be ever more broke.

Journalist Amy Larocca takes one for the team in How to Be Well, venturing into the wellness space with a skeptical eye and a snarky voice. It’s not a spoiler to say that she was not especially impressed with what she found, given that the subtitle of the book is “Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time.” In other words, if you already have the sense that the colonics industry — which amounts to recreational irrigation of your colon — may be oversold as a life-changing procedure, if you’ve ever gone to Paltrow’s Goop website for a chuckle, you will love this book. If you are a devotee of all things Goop, it will only make you mad.

Larocca begins with a brief history of how wellness evolved. In 1979, she wrote, Dan Rather, on the TV show 60 Minutes, said “Wellness. That’s a word you don’t hear every day.” He was reporting on the Wellness Resource Center in California, and during the segment, asked clients if the idea wasn’t something akin to a “middle-class cult.” It seems prescient now, given the range of strange offerings in the genre, but it’s mostly mainstream. The wellness aisle at your drugstore, Larocca writes, may contain everything from mouthwash to lip gloss to nasal spray. Wellness also encompasses incense, apple-cider vinegar and goat yoga. “It’s a brew that has the potential to drive you nuts,” she writes.

She takes us from the Harvard-educated Dr. Andrew Weil to Dr. Frank Lipman, wellness guru to the stars, and Dr. Mark Hyman, a popular podcaster and proponent of “functional medicine,” which focuses on the root causes of illness and disease. (Lipman and Hyman, Larocca writes, “share a commitment to fascia rolling, morning sun exposure and a cold rinse at the end of a hot shower.”) She also introduces us to Robin Berzin, the founder of Parsley Health, a booming functional medicine practice with holistic doctors that sells memberships for $225 a month or $99 a month if you’re in-network. Parsley is a medical practice that presents as a spa; as with an airport lounge, members who live near a physical location in New York and Los Angeles can hang out there, even if they don’t have an appointment. The average American talks to a primary-care physician 19 minutes a year, Larocca writes, while Parsley members talk to a physician 200 minutes a year. Similar practices are rising up all over the country — but be careful, as wonderful as they may seem, Larocca notes that some of the physicians aren’t board-certified, which has long been the standard of care.

That’s only one aspect of wellness, however, which Larocca says “is every bit as much about looking better as it is about feeling better.” The essence is in the word “glow.”

“The term is so prevalent that it sometimes feels as if a simple replace-all function has been applied to the entire beauty marketing machine: Alexa, find ‘skinny’ and replace all with ‘strong’; find ‘beauty’ and replace all with ‘glow.’” Glowing can be achieved with exercise, with dry brushing (a kind of exfoliation), with supplements and gummies, with bone broth. There is, essentially, Larocca says, a “Glow Cinematic Universe.”

The author describes herself as a “secular atheist,” which sets her apart from the majority of Americans and also adds a certain acidic overlay when she is talking about things like prayer and meditation as part of wellness routines and fitness classes as “spiritual centers.” She believes that “the gospel of wellness” is replacing religious life, and that might be a good conclusion for anyone who, like the author, admits that “I don’t know many people with organized religious lives” which can also be interpreted as “I don’t know many people who aren’t like me.” By the time we get to her chapter that is simply titled “Cult,” the reader might get the sense that she’s not just talking about crystals and sound baths (meditation in which people are “bathed” in sound waves), but about any person who professes any kind of spiritual belief.

The only wellness practice she seems to respect throughout her journey is simple meditation — closing her eyes and repeating a mantra silently, twice a day, 20 minutes at a time. “… it was great to be so totally, completely still,” she writes. She also practices the 4-7-8 breathing technique to calm herself: breathe in for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, breathe out for 8 seconds. “There are technical reasons why it works: stress is all sympathetic nervous system; slow breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nerves, calming it all down. It’s simple, logical, direct. For me, it works.”

Summarizing her conclusions at the end, Larocca worries that we are replacing one set of disordered behaviors and practices with another set of disordered behaviors and practices. We don’t know the long-term effects of household chemicals on our health, but we also don’t know the long-term effects of the vitamins and supplements we are being sold today, she writes. What she knows to be true is mostly the stuff we already know: “Drink enough water. Sleep as much as you can. Eat big leafy greens instead of things you can’t pronounce.” And so on. But she also acknowledges, “What is most relevant to my health is my socioeconomic status.”

“What no one wants to say is this: what you really need is to be lucky, and what is often meant by ‘lucky’ is rich.” In other words, wellness might not be the cult of the middle class as Dan Rather once postulated, but the cult of the upper class. B —Jennifer Graham

“It is a strange fact of human history that we tend to focus so little on disease,” John Green writes in his new book Everything is Tuberculosis. In a history class in college, “I learned of wars and empires and trade routes, but I heard precious little of microbes, even though illness is a defining feature of human life.”

Instead, in school, disease is related to medicine and the biological sciences, even though a certain disease, with which Green is currently obsessed, is part of the reason why New Mexico became a state, and one of the reasons that three teenagers were so willing to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, leading to the start of the first World War War.

This disease, in Green’s telling, also indirectly gave us the cowboy hat.

The origin story of the Stetson is the rare light-hearted anecdote in a book about the oldest infectious disease on the planet. Globally, tuberculosis still kills more than a million people a year, even though it’s rarely seen in the U.S. and we don’t vaccinate for it here. When cases do arise — as one did in New Hampshire earlier this year — officials work quickly to contain it, and the patient is usually cured.

Like most Americans, Green, who found fame with his 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars, paid little attention to tuberculosis — until he encountered it while visiting health care facilities in the West African nation of Sierra Leone a few years ago. He writes that he considered TB “a disease of history — something that killed depressive nineteenth-century poets, not present tense humans.”

Even the language of TB, which has long been called consumption, sounds quaint to American ears.

But after Green met a 17-year-old in Sierra Leone who had been stricken with the disease in childhood, tuberculosis had a face. He returned home and started to read about TB, and suddenly, everything was coming up tuberculosis. It turns out that Green even had a relative who died of TB in 1930 at age 29.

Green is the history teacher we wish we’d had in high school. We remember things not by memorizing facts but by hearing stories, and Green has amassed a medicine chest full of stories about tuberculosis, and about the evolution of medicine in general, and he strings them together while, in alternating chapters, introducing us to Henry, the young patient at a TB hospital in Sierra Leone called Lakka.

Green assumed that Henry was much younger than he was because he was so small. His size, however, turned out to be because of chronic malnutrition compounded by TB, which destroys the appetite as it eats away at the body, especially the lungs.

Tuberculosis is curable with the right medication. So why, except when it was briefly displaced by Covid-19, is this still the world’s deadliest infectious disease?

For one thing, people are especially vulnerable to TB if they have a weakened immune system because of diabetes, malnutrition or HIV. It spreads in tight quarters when people cough or sneeze. Most people who are infected will not develop the disease; about 10 percent do, and not everyone with “active” TB will die from it as they commonly did centuries ago.

But because the disease has developed resistance to treatment and proliferates in places with the least resources, it is still causing significant suffering to people like Henry and his mother, whose lives were already cruelly hard before tuberculosis moved in. The mother struggled to feed her two children and at times couldn’t afford to buy rice, Henry and his sister subsisting for a time on milk flavored with spices.

As Green explains, in rich countries with robust health care systems, a person with money or insurance can get testing that pinpoints the specifics of a TB infection, allowing for proper treatment.

In poverty-stricken Sierra Leone, where Ebola killed a sizable number of physicians and nurses during the most recent outbreak, these tests were not available, nor was the most cutting-edge of treatments. Henry’s condition was diagnosed with an X-ray and he was given a general cocktail of pills that were ultimately ineffective. He was trapped in a roller coaster of getting better and then getting worse. By the time Green met him, the teen had been sent to a hospital where patients go to die.

The night before he was transferred, Green writes, mother and son lay together in Henry’s hospital bed “and together they cried through the night.”

The facility to which he was being transferred was the one where he would, by sheer chance, meet Green.

Green takes us through the history of TB, including one of the more bizarre chapters of the disease: the period in the 18th and 19th centuries in which the disease became romanticized and even contributed to long-lasting standards of beauty. “Maybe the nineteenth-century Romantics would die early, but oh, the poems they would write,” was the thinking of the time.

John Keats died of TB at age 25, as did Stephen Crane at age 29; the Bronte sisters had tuberculosis. For a time, “Consumption was believed to bring the creative powers to new levels, helping artists get in deeper touch with the spirit as their worldly bodies literally shrank away,” Green writes. This idea was so prevalent that as TB rates fell in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century some people worried aloud that literature would suffer.

But Keats, who would wake up in the night crying from the pain, put to rest any romantic notions about TB, writing at one point, “We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

It is this suffering, apparent in Henry’s story, that Green wants us to remember, as he crafts the book around the question: Will Henry survive?

In less capable hands this could seem like a gimmick, but in fact, as Green makes clear, the odds have never been good for people with TB — one author has estimated that it killed one out of seven people who have ever been alive. It’s a legitimate concern since, even when a best-selling author takes an interest in your case, survival from active TB is never guaranteed. Everything is Tuberculous is full of heartbreaking stories of desperate doctors who were unable to save their own children.

In many ways, technology has made the world’s problems our own, and many people suffer from compassion fatigue, as the needs are so great. One of the privileges of being an American in the past few decades is to not have to think about tuberculosis at all. But maybe, Green suggests, that has been a mistake, and we need to start thinking about tuberculosis again. A —Jennifer Graham

Tilt, by Emma Pattee (Marysue Rucci Books, 227 pages)

If you’ve ever imagined yourself in the middle of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, where were you when it happened? That’s what Annie, the protagonist of Tilt, is thinking as she frantically makes her way out of a big-box store in Portland, Oregon, moments after the long-predicted “Big One” hits.

“What I’m saying is, my imaginary earthquake did not include IKEA,” Annie says.

Annie is 35 years old and 37 weeks pregnant when the earthquake hits on the very morning that she has finally pushed past her inertia and gone shopping for a crib. Up until this point, the “nursery” in the two-bedroom apartment that she shares with her husband, Dom, consisted of an empty room and a car seat still in its box. To say that she is ambivalent about this pregnancy is an understatement. Also, Annie and Dom are barely solvent, a circumstance that she blames on Dom’s unwillingness to let go of his dream of being a famous actor, even though he is 38 and his latest “big break” is being an understudy for the lead in a local production of “King Lear.”

Annie herself is something of a theater kid, but she has largely abandoned the dream of her younger self to be a playwright, having taken a 9-to-5 job that pays the bills while suffocating her soul. She is on her first day of maternity leave when the earthquake hits the Pacific Northwest. It is the long-feared Cascadia earthquake, one that collapses buildings and bridges and destroys all communications and life as we know it. Annie survives with minor injuries but in her struggle to escape the building she leaves her purse, keys and phone behind. Unsure of what to do, not knowing if her apartment still exists or if her husband is alive, she sets off on foot, in a pair of Birkenstock sandals, planning to walk to the coffee shop where her husband works, some miles away.

It is a precarious journey for anyone, let alone a woman just weeks away from giving birth. Almost everything around her is broken or ablaze, people are dazed and injured or dying, and, as the hours go by, survivors are becoming predatory.

As Annie makes her way through the streets she reflects on a fight she and her husband had the previous night — and tells the story to her unborn child, which she affectionately calls Bean. It was a run-of-the-mill fight, but also one that summarizes the couple’s journey: “Because all fights are about nothing in the grand scheme of things but then also in the grand scheme of things when taken all together, they tell a larger story. Like each fight is a star in the sky and now that I’ve been with your father for a decade or so I can look up at the constellation of all of our arguments and see a shape there, clear as day,” Annie tells her child.

That constellation becomes clear to the reader in a series of flashbacks that alternate with Annie’s real-time journey and also give us snapshots of Annie’s hardscrabble upbringing and her relationship with her late mother. We learn of the bright promise that lit up Annie’s twenties, as she writes and produces a play that led to her meeting and marrying Dom. But as she settles into the monotony of her job as an office manager for a tech company, those dreams “sparkle at us from a distant mountaintop” amid a life consisting of “an infinite amount of time spent unloading the dishwasher and waiting in line at the grocery store.”

She wavers between trying to appreciate her life as it is, and wondering whether she and Bean would be better off on their own. She can’t shake the idea that Dom is failing her. But it is unclear whether he is failing Annie, or whether she is failing him. She grapples with these questions on the journey, in which she forms an unlikely bond with a young mother who is trying to reach the school where her daughter was when the earthquake hit, and as she encounters a variety of memorable characters: a bicyclist whose wife has been seriously injured, a malevolent gang of teenagers, the passing drivers who offer her a ride, a young woman who works with Dom.

Parents, Annie notices, are everywhere. “What is it about parents that you always know they are parents?” she muses. “That look that says I am serious but I also spend lots of time picking up LEGOs. Their hands tense and anxious from constantly cutting apple slices. A kind of hanging flesh around their mouth. A hurried way of walking.”

Ultimately, while this is a novel about the end of the world as we know it, a species of the so-called “apocalypse genre,” it’s also about coming to grips with your life when your life has not turned out as you planned, when you are so dissatisfied with your lot that even an earthquake doesn’t mess up your plans. “Nobody wants to be where they are,” Annie thinks at one point. “So would it really matter so much if the earth swallowed us all?”

But Pattee answers her character with this book, which thrums with tension and is gorgeously written, with scenes and phrases that will long remain with the reader. She describes the blaring of car horns as “honks [that] rise around us like the mating calls of a long extinct species” and Annie’s monotonous existence as “looking for some way to spend a Saturday, all those Saturdays collecting in dusty piles around the house.”

A narrative built around an interior conversation with an unborn child takes a bit of getting used to, but after a while, it works, and gives Annie license to deliver asides like this one, spoken to the child after a remembrance of an exchange the parents had the night before the earthquake:

“Did you hear me say that? Were you listening to all that? Seeing the dusty baseboard, cracked linoleum, and light fixtures from the eighties. Did you look at us in our baggy pajamas, in our untoned bodies, and think, Them? Them?”

Tilt is a remarkable literary debut. Every end of the world as we know it should be this good. A —Jennifer Graham

Source Code, by Bill Gates (Knopf, 315 pages)

Of all the Big Tech moguls, Bill Gates is the one getting the least attention these days. Since his split with his wife of 27 years, Melinda French Gates, announced in 2021, he seems to have struggled to find public favor amid reports of infidelity and meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. He’s not disappeared from the spotlight altogether — he still contributes at Microsoft and heads the foundation that he and his former wife founded, and he still makes book recommendations on his personal website, GatesNotes.com. On the cusp of 70, he’s not making headlines like he once did, although maybe that’s a good thing.

But he’s back in the spotlight on the occasion of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, coupled with the release of a memoir, Source Code, that is being billed as an origin story for Gates. The book covers only a portion of his life — childhood through the early days of Microsoft. That timeline delivers Gates from the minefield of writing about his marriage and divorce, although that may be yet to come; reportedly, this is the first of three volumes.

Does the world want to read three books about Bill Gates? Does it even want to read one? That’s yet unclear, but Source Code is surprisingly engaging, both as an autobiography and as a period piece — the period being the 1960s and 1970s when Gates was coming of age. It was a different time, to be sure.

Gates begins with a story about a treacherous hike he undertook with friends as a sophomore in high school. It was to take more than a week and cover 50 miles in the Olympic mountains. With no adult supervision. Again, it was 1971 — a different time. Today, child protective services might pluck the boys off a mountain mid-hike, especially under the conditions they were hiking in.

At one point the trip got quite difficult, and Gates explains how he coped, by going deep in his own mind and thinking about computer code. But the fact that he spent a day or so marching silently through the woods, while accompanied by friends, thinking about coding isn’t the most amazing part of the story. That would be the fact that he still remembered the code he had written in his head three and a half years later when he had need of it for a project that would lead to Microsoft. “I have always been able to hyperfocus,” he later writes, and that seems an understatement that explains a lot.

Gates’ brain has already been the subject of a Netflix documentary (2019’s Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates), so it’s no surprise when he writes “my parents knew that the rhythm of my mind was different from that of other kids.” He read early and often — by age 9, he had read every volume of the 1962 World Book Encyclopedia. He had a compulsion to rock, at first on a rocking horse on which he would sit for hours, but later, even in adulthood, swaying back and forth when he was thinking. He thought of things that interested him, or that had some sort of tangible reward. (He memorized Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, but only because a Sunday School teacher offered to buy dinner on the top of Seattle’s Space Needle for anyone who did so.)

He shares a note his mother saved from the director of his preschool who said “he seemed determined to impress us with his complete lack of concern for any phase of school life. He did not know or care to know how to cut, put on his own coat, and was completely happy thus.”

Gates rummages through childhood memories like a grandfather with no plans for the weekend and an audience at the ready — we learn about his father’s first car, a tornado that touched down in the family’s backyard, what he ate at the World’s Fair (Belgian waffles, their debut in the U.S.). It was a privileged and well-ordered life, almost Cleaver-esque. “We lived by the structure of routines, traditions, and rules my mother established. … You did not leave the house with an unmade bed, uncombed hair, or a wrinkled shirt.”

When his mom was off volunteering with the Junior League, her mother would fill in, always with “a string of pearls and perfectly coiffed hair.” Every summer, the family would spend two weeks on vacation near a waterfront with nine other families. Gates’ parents threw a roller-skating party for all their friends every Christmas. Norman Rockwell would have had a field day with many of these stories, wholesome as they are. And they are the best part of this memoir, told with the affection of age, simply because they are part of the Gates story that we don’t know. (Which is a good thing, since this is also the bulk of it — he’s not even out of high school 160 pages in.)

The scaffolding of his career is already well-known to anyone paying attention: how he became obsessed with nascent computer technology in high school and formed deep friendships with similarly inclined, nerdy friends; the ups and downs of his friendship with the late Paul Allen, with whom he co-founded the world’s largest software company. Source Code gives us engaging and often funny anecdotes along the way to their success, as well as the pain. He writes movingly of the accidental death of one of their closest friends, and of seeing his friend’s mother, after the memorial service, “curled up on the sofa, sobbing.”

Gates, of course, threw himself even more deeply into coding as he processed his own grief, and he grew closer to Allen in the subsequent years, leading up to the pivotal day when they saw the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, with its breathless article about “the world’s first minicomputer kit” which could be had for about the price of a color television.

Gates had filled out his application for Harvard on a typewriter — that’s how different his world was then from ours today. It’s easy to forget how radically the world has changed in the past half-century, but Source Code reminds us, page after page. I’m still not convinced that the world needs three books about the life of Bill Gates, but I’m at least open to the possibility after finishing the first. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Source Code, by Bill Gates

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp (Little, Brown and Co., 341 pages)

When you toss a plastic water bottle in a recycling bin, you’re saving the Earth — or so we’ve been told for decades. But in recent years a more disturbing story has been emerging, with evidence that much of the stuff in our recycling bins is not being recycled but is being shipped, at significant financial and human cost, to developing nations.

In Waste Wars, journalist Alexander Clapp goes Dumpster diving for the truth, traveling the globe to witness what he calls “the wild afterlife of your trash.”

It’s a sobering story that’s being compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 launched the environmental movement with its examination of the devastating effects of pesticides. But Waste Wars is not so much about how America’s garbage is destroying us, but about how it’s trashing other countries.

Clapp’s introduction includes an astonishing statement: “Since the early 1990s, when your discarded Coke bottle first emerged as a major object of global commerce, China had been the recipient of half the plastic placed into a recycling bin anywhere on Earth.” In another decade, he writes, “America’s biggest export to China was the stuff Americans tossed away.”

But China got fed up and stopped accepting the world’s plastic, creating chaos in the global trash trade. “Within months, Greek garbage started surfacing in Liberia. Italian trash wrecked the beaches of Tunisia. Dutch plastic overwhelmed Thailand.”

The richest nations soon realized that the poorest could be counted on to take their waste — not just plastic and the remains of incinerated garbage (all that ash has to go somewhere) but also things like sewage sludge. The garbage and waste shipped to other countries is sometimes processed and sometimes repurposed, but often buried or dumped anywhere a truck driver thinks he can get away with it. In some areas sewage sludge has been broadly distributed and then paved over with “roads to nowhere.” In one area of Kenya, there are acres of six-story-high trash mountains seeping a poisonous soup that mosquitoes won’t breed in.

These sorts of arrangements have sometimes been brokered by government officials with no say by the citizens affected. In Guatemala in the early 1990s, for example, 200 families were “relocated” from their villages to make way for the processing of sewage coming from Miami, Galveston and other U.S. cities. In Turkey, a Kurdish farmer watched a truck stop outside his citrus groves, dump a load of garbage and light a match, the resulting fire nearly destroying his livelihood in the coming years.

Then there’s the e-waste. Clapp travels to a place in Ghana known as Agbogbloshie, which is a slum in which much of our electronic waste winds up. Perhaps, he says, your first cell phone and Game Boy, your DVD player, your college laptop, perished here. He writes about “enterprising young men in Ghana who have spent their lives rummaging through the piles of keyboards, desktop monitors, and smartphones that waste brokers in rich countries have shipped to Agbogbloshie; they are seasoned at restoring these busted electronics back to life — and, on occasion, using them to conduct epic long-range fraud against residents of the countries that sent them.”

At the same time, he writes, Agbogbloshie has become “a byword for ecological ruin.” Chicken eggs there contain high levels of chemical compounds, making them “probably the most poisonous on Earth.”

And yet the enterprise provides jobs. Clapp describes what he calls a “de-manufacturing line” — young men who sit for eight or nine hours a day dismantling and smashing trash: “old ceiling fans, motorcycle mufflers, speaker systems.” It is ironic, he observes, that some of the discarded objects being destroyed contain the world’s most advanced technology and yet it is backbreaking human labor — “of an almost unimaginably archaic kind” — doing the destroying.

Unfortunately, the problems Clapp uncovers have no easy fix, driven as they are by consumer demand for products that don’t just become waste themselves but produce waste, are literally wrapped in waste, every step on the way to your house, from their production to their packaging to the cash-register receipt you receive.

The book sometimes feels a bit like a lecture in which Clapp is chastising each of us for the contents of our closets and refrigerators. And yet we needed that Game Boy, didn’t we? Yes, water bottles are bad, we get it, but for many of us, so is our tap water. It’s easy to see the problem, not so easy to see the solution. Unfortunately, Waste Wars offers no way out of the mess we are in.

At the beauty store where my youngest daughter works, they recently tried to reduce plastic bag consumption by discontinuing plastic bags and offering a paper bag for 10 cents. They had to return to plastic bags within a few months because customers were so angry, they would storm out of the store.

Other countries are being more hard-nosed. In Indonesia, which is said to be the third largest contributor to plastic in the ocean (behind China and India), stores in Jakarta banned single-use plastic bags five years ago, levying a fine that amounts to $1,800. Dubai is building an enormous incinerator that it says will burn what amounts to a thousand trucks full of trash every day. But Indonesia also has plastic being sent there from other countries, and incineration has environmental costs of its own.

Depressingly, Clapp admits at one point, “As long as plastic keeps getting physically diverted by those who consume it the most, the farther from public concern — and political action — it is likely to remain.” Waste Wars is an eloquent and deeply researched call to action, even as it’s frustratingly unclear about what that action should be. A —Jennifer Graham

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)