Quick Synopsis

A gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time after an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

Publisher’s Synopsis

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending,” (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is an “unputdownable” (Real Simple) and redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.

Book Review

Heartwood is the story of three women in the days after Valerie, a middle-aged woman challenging herself, disappears from the Appalachian Trail in Maine. As two other women search for the missing woman, Valerie fights to stay alive as she writes letters to her mother.

Although Heartwood is marketed as a literary thriller, I would argue that it is not really a thriller or a mystery. Instead, the novel reads more like literary or contemporary fiction as the narrative follows the perspectives of three women: a former scientist living in a retirement community, the lead investigator of the Maine warden service, and the lost hiker writing to her mother. The only mystery of the novel is whether Valerie is found (alive) and how the retired scientist connects to the story. While Valerie’s disappearance is central, it does not necessarily drive the narrative. Instead, Heartwood feels like a character study of these women and their maternal relationships. Instead of having the pace of a thriller, this story is rather slow. Essentially, while there is a plot, this book feels much more like a character-driven novel.

I do not typically read novels about people reckoning with their maternal relationships, which are never perfect. It is not something to which I relate or am centrally interested in. So, I would have likely skipped this book had I known it was not a thriller. 

Still, I think Amity Gaige has written a compelling novel about female familial bonds. I found Heartwood pleasant to read and without purple prose. The protagonists are well-developed and compelling characters.

Overall, Heartwood is a novel about mothers and daughters set amid a tense search for a missing hiker. If you like character-driven novels and books about family, you will surely enjoy this one.