3.5/5 Stars

Overall, I quite enjoyed this book. I thought that the multiple P.O.Vs and their formats worked really well. Being able to see into the minds of not just Valerie - the woman lost on the trail - but also of her former trail-buddy Santos, the Game Warden Beverley searching for her, and Lena, an elderly woman who seemingly has no connection to the story other than trying to figure out on her own what happened to Valerie, was executed so well. I loved how poetic Valerie's scenes were. You could really see just how much writing those letters to her mother was helping her to hold on for so long. They were probably my favorite scenes in the entire book. I did, however, feel at times that Valerie's story was overshadowed by Beverley and Lena's personal relationships with their families. For me, it took away the suspense of trying to find Valerie before time runs out.

Heartwood by Amity Gaige

Thank you NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for a complimentary copy of this novel! I was not expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. Valerie Gillis is a 42-year old nurse who has taken time off from work to hike the Appalachian Trail. She has made it close to the end where she reached the state of Maine. However, at one of the checkpoints where she was supposed to meet her husband, she never shows up. At first, he's not concerned. Maybe she's running late. He gives it a day but when she does not show up, he gets concerned and reports her missing. Along the way, Valerie had met other hikers and sometimes teamed up with them.One such person was Santo,but he had dropped out of the hike earlier. The game warden for Maine, Beverly, is put in charge of trying to locate Valerie. She brings together a whole team including k-9 units to help find her. Then there is Lena, an elderly birdwatcher living in a retirement community who becomes part of the investigation. What happened to Valerie? Did she herself purposefully disappear? Did she accidentally get lost? Or, is something more sinister going on? This novel is both heartfelt and tender while at the same time being full of suspense as the search for Valerie is laid out in this edge-of-your seat, gripping wilderness journey !
To me, this novel begs the question, how can we truly find ourselves if we've lost our way? Many times we lose ourselves in the daily mundane tasks and we forget who we truly are. So we need to take a step back and find ourselves again.
AVAILABLE April 1, 2025!

This captivating tale of survival and search in the Appalachian wilderness is a masterclass in narrative tension, weaving together three distinct female perspectives with the dexterity of a master storyteller.

Gaige's use of first-person narrative and epistolary segments is nothing short of brilliant. It's as if we're simultaneously racing through the forest with Lt. Bev's search team and huddling beside Valerie, the missing hiker, as she pours her soul into her journal. The pacing is relentless, each page turn revealing new layers of mystery and human complexity.

The dual nature of the narrative is particularly enthralling. On one hand, we're immersed in the grueling, high-stakes search led by the indefatigable Lt. Bev. On the other, we're privy to Valerie's harrowing journey through her poignant journal entries. It's a narrative tightrope walk that Gaige executes with aplomb.

And then there's Lena, the septuagenarian birdwatcher who initially seems like an outlier in this wilderness drama. Trust me, her role unfolds like a rare bird sighting - unexpected, beautiful, and utterly crucial to the story's ecosystem.

What truly elevates "Heartwood" is the golden thread of mother-daughter relationships woven throughout. It softens the harsh wilderness backdrop, adding a layer of emotional resonance that turns this mystery into a profound exploration of human connection.

Gaige's portrayal of the Appalachian Trail is a tour de force. Through Valerie's eyes, we witness nature's breathtaking majesty - the kind that makes you want to lace up your hiking boots and hit the trail. Yet, through Bev's search efforts, we're acutely aware of the lurking dangers, the wilderness transformed into a formidable adversary.

As I turned the final page of "Heartwood," I felt as if I'd emerged from the forest myself - exhilarated, contemplative, and profoundly moved. Gaige has crafted a multi-layered mystery that's as much about the enigmas of the human heart as it is about a missing hiker. It's a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, the complexity of relationships, and the enduring allure of the unknown.

Thank you, Simon & Schuster and NetGalley, for my free ARC.

Valerie Gillis, while working her way down the Appalachian Trail, has gone missing. Beverly, the Maine State Game Warden for the area Valerie goes missing is determined to find her. But as the search spans one week and then two, the likelihood of finding Valerie is slim. Meanwhile, Lena a birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community might be the only person who can ensure Valerie is find in time.

Separated into multiple POVs, this is a much deeper story than I originally anticipated. We get the standard detective POV from Beverely, Valerie’s POV is written as diary entries, and then Lena’s POV seems somewhat random at first. Each women’s thoughts are complex and complicated, and I enjoyed getting to know these women and their histories. The depictions of the wilderness though are what really make this book stand out.

This is for my atmospheric mystery readers and natural lovers. If you love character driven mysteries with lyric prose, then you will love this book. It’s a slow read and certainly not a thriller. But it is filled with stories of motherhood and self-discovery and certainly well written. It’s not entirely my cup of tea so 3.5 stars rounded down.


Heartwood comes out April 1, 2025. Huge thank you to Simon & Schuster for my advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion. If you liked this review, please let me know either by commenting below or by visiting my:Instagram @speakingof.books.
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While Heartwood was propulsive and enjoyable, it left me a bit wanting. Overall it was fairly well-written and propulsive, but the plot, characters, and themes were not particularly interesting. My favorite literary mysteries end up revealing something significant about the characters that make you consider the themes in new ways, but this one felt more like a “puzzle” mystery, and not a particularly interesting one at that. I didn’t find the reflections on motherhood to be particularly compelling or memorable, despite the fact that the theme of motherhood is one I typically love to explore. Overall, I found this one to be fairly well-written on a sentence level, but it really missed some opportunities to make it far more interesting.

Rating: 4 ⭐️
Pub Date: April 1, 2025
How I Read It: 📱

Synopsis
An experienced hiker, Valerie Gillis, goes missing in Maine on the Appalachian Trail, just 200 miles from her final destination. Game warden Beverly is tasked with finding Valerie, while Lena, a seventy-six-year-old woman in a Connecticut retirement home, puts her amateur detective skills to use to find Valerie.

My Thoughts
This story was seeming very very familiar to me as I started reading it, and that’s because it’s loosely based off of the Gerry Largay story, which I know pretty well. I was just hoping the book didn’t have the same ending as Gerry’s story, so I was quickly turning the pages to see how it all ended. I will say, this author knew her stuff as far as Maine, Connecticut, and wardens. In the beginning, I was scratching my head as to why she didn’t have Valerie get lost in the 100 Mile Wilderness, due to its dangers, but then she mentioned SERE school, and it threw in a nice twist, and that’s where things really started getting interesting. Another part I was confused about was Lena. I didn’t see where she fit in for most of the story and was really curious how she tied into everything. The Lena twist was great! I was definitely surprised by that one! This storyline will have you hooked and wanting to know how Valerie ended up where she did and whether she will make it out alive.

Final Thoughts
I wouldn’t consider this a thriller, it has some thriller type parts, but for the most part, it’s a great page-turning suspenseful mystery. If you’re about to hike the AT, maybe wait to read this when you get home, otherwise, this is a great read to start now or during a summer camping or hiking trip!

Themes:
🌪️ twists/turns
🥾 Hiking

Ratings
Characters: 4⭐️
Pace: 4 ⭐️
Enjoyability: 4 ⭐️

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book!

Though this is ostensibly a mystery about a hiker who goes missing off the Appalachian trail, the author is much more interested in the three women at the heart of the story and their mother-daughter bonds.

Beverly is the Game Warden in charge of the search for Valerie Gillis. Bev is driven, not just by her desire to find Valerie, but also by her perceived need to keep proving to her male colleagues that she is justified in her leadership role.

Valerie, lost in the wilderness off the trail, writes beautiful elegiac notes to her mother, but also gradually reveals how she came to be where she is.

At first, Lena, a relentlessly curious resident of a retirement community, thinks that Valerie might be her long estranged daughter. Even though she accepts that’s not the case, she becomes fascinated by the search and digs into it with an online community.

These three threads are distinct parts of the narrative, moving it forward even as the urgency of Valerie’s situation grows ever more dire. The author manages to bring it all together to a satisfying conclusion, as each character’s strengths close the loop.

If you’re looking for a twisty mystery, this probably isn’t it, but it works really well as a novel about survival in its different forms.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and Netgalley for the digital review copy.

There’s nothing I love more than a slow burn missing person story and this one definitely delivered! It was absolutely wonderfully written and I found myself really looking forward to each character’s POV. Overall, I really enjoyed this one and will definitely be checking out other titles by the author.

This follows the search for a woman who disappeared while hiking the Appalachian Trail through the POV of the Maine State Game Warden in charge of the rescue mission and an elderly woman living in a retirement community who becomes aware of the case through an online forum. Full of gorgeous nature writing and warmhearted characters to root for. It’s a love letter to motherhood and a powerful story of survival.

"Heartburn" is a compelling mystery/suspense novel that explores the disappearance of a female hiker through multiple POVs, letters and news bulletins. It is also an engaging mother-daughter story with themes of self-isolation and empowerment. The writing is good and the story is well-plotted. I enjoyed taking my time with this one and spreading my reading out for a couple of days. Highly recommended. Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC.

#Heartwood

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. Many positive reviews, but it was a bit too slow and fluffy for me. I am sure many find the story artistic and it may be, but not for me.

I was originally drawn to Amity Gaige's Heartwood by the cover. It's beautiful, but, as soon as I read the synopsis, I knew I needed it. I love books set in my beloved home state, and, after closely following the disappearance Heartwood is based on, I frantically flipped pages in a need-to-know kind of way, Without saying too much, at one point I thought this book was going in a direction that I didn't love, but it was only an element needed to move the plot along, and I ended up absolutely loving this gorgeously crafted novel. Some of the writing is so stunning that I went back multiple times and read it again, especially Sparrow''s journal entries. What nailed my five-star review though is the final chapter, the very last sentence, the most perfect ending.

Thank you @simonbooks @netgalley and @amity_gaige for this free arc 💖.

✨What it is about:
42 year old Valerie Gillis disappears near the Appalachian Trail. As searchers and her loved ones struggle to find her, we see the impact of her disappearance on those who she left behind.✨

💭My thoughts:
This was a very interesting dive into loneliness, human connection, resilience, and self discovery. Though slow paced at times, the suspense and all the different characters involved kept me invested in the narrative. I was intrigued to find out how all the characters would be somehow connected in the end, and what Valerie’s fate would be. Valerie’s documentation of what she thinks are her final moments was very insightful, and we see how something a little darker might be behind her disappearance. I enjoyed learning about hiking culture and survival on the Appalachian Trail, but what really caught my attention was how the author wove in all these different characters together in the story, and made them all fit almost like a puzzle, with a resolution in the end: Valerie a 42 year old nurse and experienced hiker, Lena a 76 year old bird watcher living in a retirement community, and Beverly the warden leading the search. I really did not know at the start how it would all come together, but it all did, and it worked. The story was loosely based on a real disappearance, and addressed the pandemic without having a direct focus on it, and it indeed showed how we all need to heal from hard things that happen to us. Overall, an interesting and suspenseful tale with a lot more than a disappearance behind it.

4⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Read if you like:
⛰️Slow burn
⛰️Multiple POVs
⛰️Mystery/Suspense
⛰️Human resilience and connection
⛰️Epistolary elements/journal entries

⚠️CW: Grief, guilt, parental estrangement, mentions of pandemic effects.

Give me the HBO limited series of this ASAP! Also, put me in charge of it because I could see it playing in my head from page one. This is a story of survival in so many forms. It's about finding your limits and pushing past them, until it's time to truly listen to them. It's about giving so much of yourself that there's barely anything left. It's about finding yourself again, and letting yourself be found. I thought the writing was lovely and evocative, I enjoyed the formatting shifts throughout, and I'd recommend this to lovers of true crime, mystery, nature, and lit fic.

This book contains a slow-burn mystery, a wilderness survival story, and a well-structured and well-written exploration of inner strength and resilience, among other things. I loved this story about a woman who goes missing at the end of her Appalachian Trail through-hike in Maine, the woman Game Warden who leads the massive search-and-rescue effort, and another woman in a Connecticut retirement community who unexpectedly finds herself drawn into the mystery of the missing woman. Gaige tells her story through narrative, journal entries, interviews, and online forum posts, and the format is very effective. Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for a digital review copy.

Received an ARC via NetGalley.

I found this to be a really moving and engaging story. I think I expected it to be more mystery genre but it’s not and that was fine! There is the mystery of where Valerie is and trying to find her in the woods but the story is more about the people. And that story was good.

The story is told from the perspective of three different women, all of whom I got equally invested in.

Oh my gosh this book! Such beautiful writing and an amazing story. I loved it!

Thank you NetGalley and Amity Gaige!

Heartwood by Amity Gaige is a suspense-filled, literary page-turner that begins when hiker Valerie goes missing just 200 miles from her destination on the Appalachian Trail deep in the woods of Maine. As the novel follows Valerie’s quest, it picks up the story of Beverly, the Maine State Game Warden heading up the search and rescue effort and weaves in the insights of Lena, a wheelchair-bound Connecticut retirement community resident. This novel, like Gaige’s fascinating SEA WIFE, explores mother/duaghter relationships and what it means to be a parent. As Valerie jots down her thoughts while struggling to survive, Gaige shows how those searching for Valerie mirror the healing power of nature. The characters’ kindness and resilience make this a rich read.

This was the rare book that hooks me from the first chapter and has me thinking about when I'm going to get my next few minutes to read it. I don't usually gravitate to mysteries/thrillers but the cover and description appealed to me and I was excited to give it a try. Many thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read the ARC.

We get three main points of view for this story: Valerie, an Appalachian Trail hiker lost in the Maine wilderness; Bev, the game warden in charge of the search for Valerie; and Lena, a reclusive naturalist living in a Connecticut retirement facility. We also get some chapters from a hiking companion of Valerie's, via interview transcripts with another game warden. I liked how the author chose to represent each point of view differently. Bev was in first person, and we (kind of) end with her, making her a sort of primary connecting thread. Lena was close third person, and Valerie was first person but via letters she wrote to her mother in her trail journal while lost. Sometimes multi-POV stories can feel muddled but these were well-differentiated, and those different presentations felt well suited to each character's role in the story.

While this is a story about a lost hiker and a community's quest to find her, deeper down it's a far-reaching rumination on companionship and motherhood. Valerie is writing to her mother. Bev's mother has never understood, supported, or appreciated the work that sustains her. Lena avoids intimacy due to unresolved trauma from her daughter cutting off contact with her. Valerie's mother displays great strength and grace even as chances of finding her daughter alive dip downward every day. Valerie and Bev have no children of their own, but are incredible caretakers of others.

While each woman started from a place of strength, throughout the story we see them confront some of their worst fears and begin to heal old wounds. I enjoyed watching these arcs bend and intersect against the backdrop of Valerie's disappearance, and the tension of what might become of her as the search wears on into its second week. Overall a very enjoyable read which I would recommend.

Also, bonus points for badass dogs with jobs!

How do you make a "lost in the wilderness" book boring?

You do the talky talky, switch characters then more talky talky, switch to yet another and more talky talky and the book moves nooooowhere.

Booksource: Netgalley in exchange for review.