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 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.
Despite her position at the center of this crisis, Valerie’s poetic voice is not the novel’s most convincing. The sense of suspense and deterioration is thwarted by her literary artfulness, her languid reflections on the past and her self-conscious cliff-hangers. We expect the thoughts of a starving woman crashing through the dark woods desperately craving her anxiety medication, but instead we get the pearly phrases of a writing professor at Yale ... The real furnace of Heartwood is its most surprising and unpleasant character ... Throughout this peculiar thriller, Gaige explores the complicated and ever-evolving bonds that tether family members.
Lena is one of the novel’s most gripping characters, and fittingly, Gaige gives her one of the more surprising and satisfying arcs of the book ... tThe mystery is mostly an afterthought. The real suspense of Heartwood is whether all three women will make it out of their metaphorical woods.
A crackling adventure story, a meditation on the fraught human connection to nature, and a subtle examination of the rocky relationships between mothers and daughters that shape the lives of its three main characters, the novel tightens its grip as it moves toward uncovering its central mysteries.
