Goodreads Summary
Heartwood takes you on a gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.
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 a redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.
Character Summary
Fifty-seven-year-old Lieutenant Beverly Miller has always been exceptional. The oldest of three, she stepped in after her father’s death—which altered her mother’s mental state—and cared for the home and her sisters. Before his passing, Bev and her father spent hours outdoors, forging and fishing. Bev knew early on that whatever she did in life, she wanted to do it outside. She earned a master’s in wildlife conservation and went on to become one of only two female game wardens in all of Maine.
Valerie Gillis—known on the trail as Sparrow—was not a novice hiker. At forty-two, she was experienced, prepared, and, as a nurse, knew how to care for herself and others on the trail. She never hiked without a plan, setting checkpoints with her husband, Gregory, who would replenish her rations, treat her to a meal, or even take her to a hotel for a hot shower. To her “Tramily,” the hikers she befriended, she was selfless, empathetic, giving—and described as magic.
At Cedarfield Active Life Plan Community, Lena Kucharski is a loner. Adjusting to her new surroundings, she often skips social gatherings, preferring instead to forage in the garden. She finds kinship with another forager in a Reddit forum, and together they become engrossed in the story of the missing hiker.
My Thoughts
The writing is beautiful—almost as if it were meant to be poetry. The descriptions of the Maine woodlands read like prose. The writing is delicate. And while I loved the style and depth of the dialogue, the story did drag on at times.
There are three narrative threads running throughout the book, and it’s tricky to see where they intersect to make the whole plot come together. But the clearest and most consistent thread is love. This book is a love letter. To whom? I’m not sure. About what? Maybe Maine. Maybe hiking. That’s for the reader to decide.
Lt. Bev loves her job—perhaps even more than the life her job has afforded her. She is devoted to every aspect of it, a calling she cherished long before she was even hired. Lena loves her daughter but, for most of her daughter’s life, has lacked the tools and language to express that love or make amends for the past. Still, she loves her so deeply that even hearing about the missing hiker brings her to tears, as if it could have been her daughter.
Valerie loves herself. She realizes this while hiking, in tune with nature and her own needs and wants. She rediscovers herself. But the greatest love is how many people love Valerie—those who met her once and those who spent long stretches of time with her. Everyone who knew her, loved her. As a young woman, Valerie wrote poetry, and in the present she still speaks in stanzas, her letters to her mother brimming with gratitude for the tools she was given.
The theme of love is evident, but I did feel like we took three left turns to get there—when one right would have sufficed. The prose is plentiful, but the shorter chapters and varied formats break it up. For me, Valerie’s diary entries slowed the pacing the most.
I also wasn’t sure how Lena would fit into the story, but in the end, it worked. Still, for a while, her chapters dragged, and I grew tired of hearing from her. I liked Lt. Bev a lot, but I also grew weary of the repeated focus on how much she hated her body growing up. I get why it was included—it helps us understand her better—but it felt overdone.
Final Verdict
It was alright. For content alone, I’d give it 4 stars.
The pacing dragged at times, but the writing is stellar. I understand the hype. This is a slow-burn mystery—not a thriller. Don’t go into it expecting suspense.
whitneydaniell 
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