A History of Wild Places

This hovers between 3.5 to 4 stars for me, but I'd round it up to 4. This started off pretty interesting with some low magic and slight supernatural powers, but then it quickly became a delectable page-turner with a deep mystery revolving around an isolated, cult-like community in the middle of nowhere, America.

We start off meeting Travis Wren, who is gifted with the power of seeing the memories of people when he touches an object that they used to own or had come into contact with recently. It's both a blessing and a curse for Travis, but he chooses to use his talents to help people locate missing friends and family. This time, he's on the trail of Maggie St. James, a children's author who had gone missed a few years prior. In following the ghostly after-images of Maggie St. James, Travis stumbles upon a community called Pastoral. We then hop years later into the perspective of married couple Theo and Calla who have built their lives in Pastoral. The community is isolated because they are afraid of a mysterious pox-like disease from the elm trees around them, that infects and kills anyone who wanders past their village borders. But Theo is persistently haunted by the thought of seeing what lies outside of Pastoral, especially after he stumbles upon a derelict and abandoned truck belonging to Travis Wren not far beyond their borders.

This book was just really exciting. Right from the get-go there were so many questions and tidbits that were dropped for the reader's benefit in solving the overarching mystery. Part One was the part that felt the longest, primarily because it was one huge, long chapter spanning 70+ ebook pages for me. Nevertheless, it was still interesting enough as we follow Travis's story, understand the powers he had, and find out about the way his powers have both wrecked his life but also given him the ability to bring salvation or closure to others. After that, Part Two and after all have amazingly short chapters which probably contribute to how fast-paced the book felt. I probably read 80% of it in one sitting and wasn't able to put it down until 5am when I finally finished it.

Our three main protagonists are Theo, Calla, and Calla's younger sister Bee, who had mysteriously lost her vision more than a decade ago as a teenager. This being a mystery, we don't actually have the chance for much character development. Theo and Calla just seemed to me like a regular married couple except that they're dealing with increasing suspicions about each other and also with this whole elm pox situation with Pastoral. Despite Theo and Calla being the primary movers and shakers in the mystery, I kinda feel that we actually got a lot more character development out of Bee. Being visually impaired, Bee is gifted with an almost supernatural way of sensing everything else. She moves through the world and senses people and things around her even better than sighted people would. She assists with the pregnancies and births in Pastoral by listening to fetal heartbeats and somehow determining the health of the fetus - basically a human stethoscope. She can even locate her sister Calla in a crowd, because she “smells like yellow and like sunshine”. Furthermore, because Bee is so introspective, we see a lot more about her thoughts, her life, her hopes and expectations, her emotions, etc. With Theo and Calla, it felt a bit flat in comparison.

Pastoral was also a really interesting concept. I don't usually like stories revolving around cults because they tend to be heavily based in some kind of Judeo-Christian tenets which I've just kinda lost interest in reading about at this point. Pastoral, though, doesn't seem to be based in any kind of religious values, so that already made it rather more refreshing to read about. Instead, the community is pretty nature-centric, believing that nature is both healing and destructive at the same time. When people wander too far from the village and are brought back, they are cleansed with a “ritual”. I won't spoil what exactly it entails, but the principle behind it is that the community believes strongly that the earth itself is able to heal the infectious pox. The irony is that they also believe the pox originates from the elm trees which stems from the earth.

Pastoral is also not as heavily militarized as some other cults I've read in other stories. People seem to be somewhat free to leave the community so it's not like a hostage situation, but choose not to because of their fear of the pox. The community have sometimes also welcomed new joiners who either stumble upon them accidentally or have intentionally sought them out, although it is mentioned that no new joiners have come for the past decade. The gates of Pastoral are lightly guarded with armed sentries (Theo being one of the night guards) but they seem to be merely keeping an eye out for any movement in or out of the community, which is extremely rare in the first place, rather than to shoot trespassers or defectors on sight.

The central mystery of the book is very compelling, kind of in parallel with the excerpts of the children's book authored by Maggie St. James, and revolving around the fate of Travis Wren and Maggie. I correctly guessed some parts of the solution but it was still a good enough development that I felt accomplished for managing to guess it out rather than disappointed that it had been predictable. Some spoilery thoughts on the ending and solution of the mystery: I had somehow, at about a 50% mark and on a limb, guessed that Theo was actually Travis and Calla was Maggie with false memories. I think I just figured that if Travis had been in the house and everything pointed to him still being in Pastoral, the easiest place for him to be is still to be in that house, i.e. be Theo. Plus, Bee kept talking about how the name of Travis Wren was so familiar but it was shrouded in her memory, there was such a big element of hidden memories which led me to that theory about Theo being Travis. I was suspecting some kind of mass hallucination because the rot can't be real. We already saw the outside world in Part One and there's no plague happening, so it was either that 1) there is a real rot but somehow only specifically infecting inhabitants of Pastoral, like perhaps a secret injection somewhere, or 2) the rot was an illusion somehow. I also kept wondering why Maggie's mother knew to point Travis in the direction of Pastoral and was glad that it was thoroughly addressed at the end of the book. Even though I guessed some of these correctly, I didn't feel disappointed because it felt earned. I felt like the author did a great job at sprinkling these hints right from the very beginning for readers to be able to make that conclusion, rather than having a deus ex machina or some completely off-the-wall solution right at the end. Things I didn't quite like about the ending: the fact that the antagonist really was Levi. He just felt like such an obvious choice right from the very beginning so I was hoping for a twist there. I also lol'ed a bit at how he kinda did that whole “villain unnecessarily explaining every single detail of their plot before failing to kill the hero” monologue with Bee at the end. I also wish the aftermath was a bit more fleshed out, it seemed a bit convenient that everybody would just happily go along with Bee's explanation and even though it had been a hypnotism thing, I think having been drummed with the same story and values for more than a decade might entrench a belief system much more deeply than was depicted here.

Overall though, a very very enjoyable mystery that really kept me going, “One more chapter. Just another chapter. I need to find out what's going on.” all the way to the end.