Title: A History of Wild Places
Author: Shea Ernshaw
Genre: Thriller with Magical Realism elements
Trigger Warnings: Gaslighting, murder, blood (mentions), death, childbirth, pregnancy, alcohol use, alcoholism, suicide (mentions), torture, emotional abuse, infidelity (mentions), injury, violence, domestic abuse, ableism, gun violence (brief), death of parent (mentions), drug abuse (mentions), grief, fire (one scene), confinement
Back Cover:
Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.
Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it…he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.
Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.
Review:
I picked this up for the cult-like commune, mainly. I’m a sucker for stories of cult members discovering that there’s something rotten behind the perfect facade of their cult, and I thought this book might have some of that.
Except I was immediately engaged by Travis and his hunt for the missing Maggie St. James. He’s a loner – no family, no home, nothing to live for, on the verge of driving into the wilderness and disappearing forever. But he can see visions of the past by touching associated objects, and that makes him damn good at finding missing people. Maggie has been missing for five years and a friend convinces Travis to take the case. He visits the place where Maggie’s abandoned car was found and discovers a hidden path deep into the woods. His investigation through the deep empty woods is peppered with his backstory and how he ended up here, five hours deep into a snowy forest.
But as the back cover tells us, he vanishes too. When the story switched to the alternating perspectives of Theo, Calla, and Bee, it very nearly lost me. None of those three characters – curious Theo, fearful Calla, and bold but blind Bee – engaged me nearly as much as Travis did. But I was at least curious enough about what happened to Travis and Maggie to keep reading.
I guess it was really strong curiosity, because after Travis is out of the picture, the story slows to a snail’s pace. It’s such a slow burn that you don’t even realize anything’s on fire until nearly halfway through. But I really did want to know what happened to Travis, especially since the few clues I was given added up to “this makes no sense at all.” And around the halfway point, it did pick up. Characters started realizing other characters were keeping secrets, clues started popping up that filled in a few answers but left more questions, and I started to get hints of just how sinister things were under the surface of Pastoral.
This was the kind of book that kept me coming up with theories for the true answer, and even though I did guess all the reveals, for most of them I formulated the correct guess only a few pages before the reveal. (One I did guess pretty far in advance, but it was more because my plot psychic tendencies immediately jumped to “this is the most shocking option so it’s obviously the answer” than any actual on-page evidence.)
This book was significantly slower than most books I enjoy, but it was well-plotted, I only saw one of the big twists coming, and it managed to keep me engaged and asking questions up until the end. I don’t think it will end up on any Bluejay’s Personal Favorite Books lists, but I’m glad I stuck it out and finished the story.
Bluejay Reads 