Chelsea Humphrey's Reviews > A History of Wild Places

2.5

Well, I think I'm going to keep my thoughts on this one short, as it's really just personal reasons and expectations as to why this didn't work for me, and most of those reasons are spoiler filled fodder. If you're planning on reading this book, I humbly recommend the audio version if you enjoy that format, as the narration was a splendid production.

The beginning of the book really hooked me, so much so that I thought this would result in an easy 5 stars for me to give. We follow Travis as he is using his special sense of connecting with objects that people have touched to track down missing author Maggie, who seemingly fell off the earth at a certain point. His POV goes abruptly dead, and we don't hear from Travis's narration again after.

Next, we jump to an off the grid community called Pastoral that is led by a man named Levi, and we follow the POV of Theo, his wife Calla (I think this was her name?), and Bee, Calla's sister. Bee is blind and can hear unborn baby's heartbeats and other things that help the community, as they cannot leave to go to town because of a disease from the surrounding forest called The Rot. Also, the rain is bad and you don't want to get caught out in it.

I can't really give anything else without spoiling, but once we hit the Pastoral transition, I guessed one of the major plot twists immediately, because it was just so obvious from the set up and clues immediately given. Maybe if we'd had a little time to separate the beginning portion from the next section, our brains would have forgotten what had just happened and it would have been more surprising? Also, the big twist as to what's going on in Pastoral and the mystery surrounding it all was not what I was hoping for at all. I was expect layers of fantasy, horror, or at least magical realism, and the explanation behind everything felt like a let down for me. If you can keep an open mind and are ok with the pieces not quite fitting together, you should give this one a try for yourself.

*Many thanks to the publisher for providing my review copy.