Read this as part of CBR14Bingo: adapt. This book was adapted into a movie that will be released later this year. It also features a character who has to adapt to a new situation after living in captivity the first part of her life.
Books about the outdoors and/or survivalism are not my thing. Neither are complicated family dramas where abuse has to be parsed and unpacked. Yet this one really worked for me and became one of my favorite crime novels of the year, even if I found the ending uninspired.
The trick to pulling off this book was quality writing. I assumed it would be one of those page-ripping thin-chapter thrillers. To a degree it is but there’s a beauty to Karen Dionne’s writing. She gets atmosphere and characterization down well and it made for a story I wanted to keep reading. Slowly presenting flashbacks to fill in the full family history was an effective way to build on the suspense of the tale and deepen our understanding of the motivations of the lead.
I also appreciated the view of abuse presented in the book. Granted, I’m not an abuse survivor so you can take that for what it’s worth. It might be tough for some. But I thought it was interesting that Helena didn’t hate her father. She, in fact, loved him because her formative years were under his parenting and she literally didn’t know better. Dionne allowed her protagonist to have complex feelings around this; making her father do monstrous things but also loving things while never losing sight of the fact that he’s an antagonist. This might frustrate some who want her to show the father as evil, the mother as good, etc. But abuse is complex; there’s no such thing as a perfect survivor.
Overall, this is a really good book that I’m worried will be made into a paint-by-numbers thriller, which I assumed the book would be. I hope to be surprised again.