Heartwood

Starred review from March 1, 2025
A 42-year-old hiker goes missing from the Appalachian Trail in Maine in Gaige's (Sea Wife, 2020) suspenseful, wrenching novel. In July 2022, Valerie has been hiking the trail, starting in Virginia, for three months. A nurse who was devastated by working during the pandemic, she frequently meets up with her husband, Gregory, who follows her by car and refreshes her supplies. When she doesn't show up at a planned meeting place, Gregory reports her missing, and the investigation is taken up by Bev, a thirty-year veteran of the Maine warden's service. Meanwhile, at a retirement community in Connecticut, 76-year-old loner Lena becomes determined to help solve the case. As the days tick on and Valerie's fate looks more dire, Gaige moves between Bev's increasingly desperate attempts at a rescue, Lena's surprising online discoveries, and letters Valerie writes to her mother from the clearing where she has set up her tent. A crackling adventure story, a meditation on the fraught human connection to nature, and a subtle examination of the rocky relationships between mothers and daughters that shape the lives of its three main characters, the novel tightens its grip as it moves toward uncovering its central mysteries.

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April 15, 2025
A woman who's disappeared from the Appalachian Trail prompts a frenzy. Gaige's fifth novel concerns the fate of Valerie Gillis, known on the trail as Sparrow, a 42-year-old woman who's vanished somewhere in Maine while hiking a notoriously treacherous stretch. Charged with organizing the search is Beverly Miller, a lieutenant in the Maine Warden Service, and she has plenty of help--a small but committed community of volunteers is ready at a moment's notice to canvass the area. But the clock is ticking: Bev notes that 97% of lost hikers are found in 24 hours, but "the other 3 percent, we know those stories like scripture." Gaige's storytelling alternates between writings in Sparrow's notebooks, chapters from Bev's perspective, transcripts of warden tip-line messages and interviews (most prominently with Ruben Serrano--trail name Santo--a straight-talking, beefy Bronx denizen who befriended Sparrow on the trail), and chapters told from the perspective of Lena Kucharski, a nursing-home resident following the search online. Gaige's novel is at its core a mystery, with plenty of leads for Bev to pursue. (Can Sparrow's husband be trusted? Was Santo overly obsessed with her?) But the novel's strength is in capturing the way one human disappearance prompts a host of emotions--frustration, desperation, fear, and (especially) paranoia. (One throughline in the novel concerns the ways conspiracy-minded locals wonder about the true intentions of a military training school for troops at risk for capture in combat.) This gives Gaige an opportunity to write in a variety of registers, some more convincing than others--Santo's tough-but-sensitive patter feels relatively wooden, but Bev's struggles to continue the search while managing a host of details, as well as misogynist microaggressions, are rich and persuasive. Sparrow herself is a relative mystery, but the emotions she inspires are crystal clear. A winning portrait of a woman, and community, in peril.

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