A History of Wild Places

by Shea Ernshaw

Overall: I went into A History of Wild Places blind – I hadn’t even read the synopsis. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t exactly this book. It begins conventionally enough for a supernatural thriller, with a detective (Travis) who can learn about people’s past history by touching objects they’ve handled. The parents of Maggie, a children’s book author who’s been missing for years, have hired Travis as a last-ditch effort to find their daughter. Then abruptly the book shifts to three characters (Calla and Bee, sisters, and Theo, who’s married to Calla) in a commune in the woods that might be the place Maggie was heading when she vanished. The book spends a long time detailing life in the commune, gradually giving the reader tiny pieces of information about the mystery.  We get a lot of information on the fear the commune-dwellers have of “the rot,” a disease that seems to strike those who venture outside the borders of the commune, and the ramifications of this fear, before the book returns to thriller mode and builds to a conclusion.

Likes: I thought Travis was a great character in the haunted detective vein. Maggie’s backstory is compelling – she’s written a series of dark children’s books and her disappearance is linked to the death of a boy who tried to find the secret world she’s written about.  I am fascinated by closed communities (communes, cults, monasteries, etc.), so I was interested in the world of the commune.  And although I guessed some of the twists, I didn’t figure out the entirety of the mystery.

Dislikes: the middle of the book drags. I felt like I read a lot of superfluous detail about life in the commune.  I really wanted to know more about Travis and Maggie, as their stories were so interesting, and abandoning them so quickly felt like a lost opportunity. Calla, Theo, and Bee didn’t interest me as much.  The beginning and ending of the book felt like reading a completely different story from the middle.  And I felt the excerpts from Maggie’s children’s books added very little.

FYI: violence, disappearance, murder, attempted murder, difficult childbirth.