This general fiction/suspense follows Helena - a woman with a quiet life and very happy with her husband and two daughters. She's tried, and generally succeeded, to put her past behind her and keep it there. However, when her father escapes from prison, Helena's quiet life is uprooted. Helena's father is in prison for kidnapping Helena's mother when she was a teenager and keeping her in a remote cabin in the Michigan wilderness. A few years later, Helena was born and she lived the first 12 years of her life in this remote location. She grew up loving her father and enjoying the time spent learning how to hunt, track, and other survival skills. However, there's another side to her father - a deadly side - and after her father kills two prison guards while escaping, Helena knows she just might be the only person in Michigan who can find her father.
TW/CW: kidnapping, sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, animal death
I had a good time reading this, but I did find this a quieter read than I was expecting. I was expecting, based on the description, that this would be a sort of cat-and-mouse game between Helena and her father. What we got instead was a lot of Helena reflecting and telling the reader about her life growing up and that story is interspersed with chapters in the present where she is tracking down her father. And it wasn't done in a way where present-day Helena was setting a snare trap and then flashing back to the first time her father taught her how to do it. We pretty much follow Helena in chronological order from her early childhood until she was 12. For me, even calling this a suspense was a little generous because the only real parts where I felt suspense was in the last chapters. The present day story line takes place over less than 24 hours so there isn't a ton of time to built up a lot of tension in those chapters. This really felt more like a general fiction story with suspenseful elements, which is great but wasn't exactly what I was expecting based on the description of the book.
I did really enjoy how much detail and description went into the seemingly mundane elements of Helena's world and upbringing. We go in depth into various survival techniques including what types of knives are best for what jobs, how to prepare different types of food, and how to track animals. I could really feel Helena's wonder as a child at learning these different skills and how attached she was to her father. I think Dionne does a great job at showing us the dichotomy between these moments when Helena was a young child and then the brutality and abuse later that her father is responsible for. I also really liked how some of these lessons from the wilderness came back in the present day narrative and were used by Helena in her search for her father. The way in which some of these skills were ingrained in her from such a young age really came across on page and I think they were very well integrated into the rest of the story.
The character interactions and relationships were really interesting because, as the reader, you know that Helena's father is a bad guy who kidnapped her mother, but to Helena, he was just her dad. We get to see how Helena broke out of her father's spell and begins to see him for who he really is. This character progression reminded me a lot of the memoir Educated by Tara Westover where Westover had a similar progression with her upbringing where she slowly realized that her parents (and father, specifically) were flawed people. I wish we got to see more of how adult Helena's relationships with her own family played out more in the present day. We get a lot of Helena telling the reader how much she wants to protect her husband and daughters, but we don't see much interaction on page. I really enjoyed Helena's relationship with her mother and how she, at first, followed her father's lead and sort of looked down on her mother. Their relationship does change over the years, but it is, understandably, complicated as Helena is a direct result of the horrible acts her mother lived through.
I did find the pacing to be really slow through most of the book, but the last 20% or so did kick things up a notch. Like I mentioned above, this book really read more like a general fiction so the tension and pacing wasn't as tight or as high as I would expect from a suspense/thriller book. Most of the tension and intrigue was in the reader knowing that Helena does, at some point, leave the isolated Michigan wilderness and her father goes to jail, but we don't know the exact circumstances behind those decisions until the later parts of the book. I listened to the audio book, which I think probably helped me in this point because audios are more engaging for me so it is my preferred method for slower paced books like this (or non-fiction). I really enjoyed the narrator (Emily Rankin) and thought she did a great job at really conveying some of the more quiet parts of the story in an engaging way.
I think the ending gave me everything I was looking for when I started the book. The pacing and tension ramp up, we get more direct action on page instead of the memories and flashbacks we'd gotten most of the rest of the book. It almost felt like the reader, just like Helena, had this backlog of information that we can use to try and outsmart Helena's father. The ending was great because the climax turns into this turning point for Helena where she has to finally face her childhood and history that she, to some extent, has been running from for the past 20 years. I think Dionne did a great job at including details and conversations that helped to fill in some of the gaps that were still left at that point in the story. We get a little bit of resolution after the climax, but I would have liked to see more.
Overall, this was a really interesting read, although it did have less action than I was expecting. I really enjoyed the characters and relationships as well as the detailed naturalistic elements. I would recommend the audio book, especially because of the slower pacing and lower tension.
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