This book left me torn: I loved the wilderness theme, but too much in the foreground was hard to swallow: that Maya should be employed at a psychiatric health facility where she had been a patient herself, and be trusted alone with a troubled young man while still in therapy herself was unconvincing. And the HUGE coincidence that ties everything together at the end was a problem.

For all that, Mejia knows how to write hard-hitting emotion, and there's some interesting research into families who choose to live off the grid for different reasons.

It seems that the ambitious material doesn't come together in a satisfactory way - maybe another rewrite was needed to do it justice? An interesting novelist, all the same.