A Slow-Burn Thriller Set on the Appalachian Trail

New York Times

30-03-2025

In the long shadow of Cheryl Strayed's 'Wild,' it borders on ambitious to write a book about a solo female hiker setting off on a long, prickly journey. Amity Gaige does it anyway with 'Heartwood.' A novelistic cousin to Strayed's best-selling 2012 memoir of tackling the Pacific Crest Trail after her mother's death, it's the story of three woodsy women each lost in her own wilderness, and the gnarled roots between mothers and daughters.
At the center of the story is Valerie Gillis, a nurse who goes missing in Maine during an audacious hike of the 14-state beast that is the Appalachian Trail. Her chapters are presented through the 'love letters' (scrawled as increasingly desperate journal entries) that she writes to her mother, Janet, to pass the time and stay sane while she's stranded. Then there's Beverly 'Lt. Bev' Miller, a veteran game warden who leads the search for Valerie while silencing calls about her own ailing 'Ma.' By far the most magnetic of the novel's interconnected trio is Lena Kucharski. She's a 76-year-old retired scientist who forages for fresh dandelions, among other edible flora and fauna, undeterred by her motorized wheelchair or the banality of the Connecticut retirement community where she now lives. Estranged from her daughter, Christine, a lonely Lena is free to turn a forensic eye to the Gillis case.
Through Valerie's epistolary chapters, Gaige reveals that the missing hiker was an obsessively clingy child (overly attached, to use modern family therapy lingo) who viewed her mother as practically mythic. 'Sometimes, in your lap, I would press my hand against your chest so that I could feel the center of you — your heartwood, your innermost substance, like the core of a tree that keeps it standing,' Valerie recalls. A 'poet soul,' Valerie fills her odes to Janet with lush detail, observing the 'infinite bosk' of the forest, which is blanketed with leaves 'layered together like phyllo pastry.'
Though Gaige writes vibrantly about Valerie's setting ('trees, and more trees, a boreal hall of mirrors'), Valerie herself is less vivid. She's meh about her loyal (or is he?) husband, Gregory Bouras, but we don't really see her wrestling with whether or not to leave him and their saccharine, surface-level marriage, a missed opportunity to infuse Valerie with vulnerability (or a refreshing hint of ugliness). She's traumatized by nursing during Covid, but her pandemic back story never feels as visceral as the trail. And though Gaige writes strikingly about realizing your mother is only human — 'No woman is a star. No woman is a god or a tree or a magician' — Valerie never fully reckons with her idolization of Janet.
Fortunately, Bev's jagged relationship with her mother proves more complex. Even after she became a pioneering female lieutenant, Bev still failed to win approval from her traditional Ma, who considers wardenship unwomanly. ('Do you wish to be a man?' Ma asks in a flashback.) Nonetheless, Bev is married to her job, and she finds fulfillment in her stellar record of finding missing people. 'The backcountry is my mother,' she declares. Bev's an earthy heroine, one whom Gaige imbues with just enough folksiness to be charming. A speech she makes to search volunteers, reminding them that 'it's not always who you'd bet on that makes it,' is especially winning.
The true heartwood of the novel, though, is Lena, an 'acquired taste' and total delight in the vein of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. Lena's senior life is rich with interest, from her virtual friendship with a younger man she meets on a foraging subreddit (they bond over black locust flowers, which he eats 'like popcorn') to her real-life friendship with her fellow retirement-community resident Warren Esterman, who's clearly in love with her. A scientist to her core, she drives away Christine by treating her like a specimen, but Lena can't help herself; looking at life through a microscope is her specialty. 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.
'Heartwood' absorbs the reader in the subculture and shorthand of 'the A.T.,' including 'tramily' (trail family), the notion of 'hiker midnight' (9 p.m.) and the use of 'trail names.' Valerie goes by Sparrow, a childhood nickname from her mother that she reframes during her many lonely hours. 'Sparrows are survivors,' she says. Her 'trail brother' Ruben Serrano, a.k.a. Santo, a Bronx-bred, self-described 'fat' Dominican American man, provides comic relief about the historic whiteness of backpacking. 'There's this moment when they literally don't understand,' he cracks of fellow hikers. 'They're like, 'Is that a person of color?''
As the days pass and hope dwindles, Valerie fears an ominous 'he' — could it be Gregory or even the bighearted Santo? Neither is a terribly convincing red herring; the mystery is mostly an afterthought. The real suspense of 'Heartwood' is whether all three women will make it out of their metaphorical woods.