Heartwood

Perfect cover for this book!

I loved Heartwood by Amity Gaige, which I just finished listening to. This is a multiple POV story, and the different main characters each had their own actor reading their part, which I think added to my overall enjoyment of the book as I felt connected to each of the main characters.

I loved all the stories--starting with Valerie, aka Sparrow, the forty-something woman who becomes lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail in Maine--we get to know her through the journal she writes to her mother during the 11 days she is lost, while she struggles to survive. She is a poet, a nurse still recovering from the trauma of treating patients during the COVID outbreak, a kind and generous person, whose kindness and generosity is part of the story of how she got lost in the first place.

But Heartwood is also about the people who are searching for her--Bev, the logistic and strategic lead of the search and rescue organization tasked with trying to find Valerie in the wilderness. Bev is totally dedicated to her job and will never give up looking for Valerie. We learn about her two younger sisters and how she took over raising them when her mother went off the rails when Bev was a teen. We also learn how she is always the outsider--the tall girl who reached six feet before high school, the Massachusetts native who will never be fully accepted by the Mainers she works with and supervises, the first woman in the organization, the first woman supervisor...you get the picture. She wore men's clothes for years before the department finally started making uniforms tailored to the female body.

And it's about the hikers she met and bonded with on the trail who are interviewed by Bev's team, particularly Santo, an overweight New Yorker from NYC, who became her main hiking partner until he had to quit the trail to return home when his dad became ill. 

Of course, it's about her family--husband and parents and their grief, hope, faith, and profound decency in the face of the unimaginable. And the husband is always first on the list of suspects! 

And, finally, it's about the people who become fascinated with Valerie's story through the press conferences, online chat groups, TV pleas for help from law enforcement and the family. Lena is the main character in this category. A resident in assisted living, wheelchair bound, a curmudgeon. a birdwatcher and naturalist and forager, estranged from her daughter, her fascination with and concern for Valerie help to pull her out of her self-imposed isolation so that she can live again.

So, I loved the stories, but I also loved learning about the mechanics of how search and rescue operates. I enjoyed hearing about how rescue dogs are trained, how grids to search are laid out, how teams of volunteers are mobilized.  

I liked the theme of mothers and daughters--Valerie was very close to her mother and talked to her and listened to her in her head while she was lost, whereas Bev's mother stopped parenting her children after her husband died and is now dying without Bev by her side, Lena's mother survived abuse within her immigrant community and wasn't able to make it not Lena's problem too. 

I am a sucker for wilderness survival stories, and this was one of the best because it was so multifaceted. It's not just how does one survive, but how does the community mobilize to help them survive. I like that.

The only time I've ever experienced being lost was when I was at summer camp in the Colorado mountains during my elementary school years. We were playing capture the flag and so were supposed to evade capture by the other team. This encouraged me to roam away from my team and hide and I got turned around and nothing looked familiar. I walked for a while and came across these huge, flat-top boulders. So, I sat there for a bit, and then started walking again, and somehow ended up back at camp. The weird thing is that no one noticed I was missing and so it wasn't a big deal when I found my way back. I was totally scared and sure I was lost-lost. I like to hike (not scarred for life), but I never leave sight of the trail!