📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚 A History of Wild Places
AUTHOR: Shea Ernshaw @sheaernshaw
Publisher: Atria Books
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ + 🐰
Published: December 7, 2021
The Review 📚 A History of Wild Places
✨ The Title/Cover Draw:
- I saw that @gabbyreads had this on her TBR and it interested me.
💜 What I liked:
- The story was beautifully told. It reminded me a lot of The Village, but with some great twists. The story is told between Calla, Theo, and Bea and how they uncover each other’s secrets. It’s just so dark and atmospheric that I couldn’t put it down.
😱 What I didn’t like:
- I wish I knew more about how Pastoral was founded, more background. Just a personal thing but it does not deter from the books.
🚦 My face at the end: 😳🤓
💭 5 Reasons to Read:
- 1. People Disappearing
- 2. Simple Living
- 3. So many secrets
- 4. Dark and Atmospheric
- 5. Beautiful writing
(no seriously I can’t give too much away)
🕧 Mini-Summary:
- After a few people have started disappearing, we learn about Pastoral and what may have happened to them.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
💯 For more details on the books we read, be sure to follow me on TikTok (@zaineylaney) or check out our Podcast – Elated Geek!
📘 Summary 📚 A History of Wild Places
Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.
Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it… he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.
Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.
Hauntingly beautiful, hypnotic, and bewitching, A History of Wild Places is a story about fairy tales, our fear of the dark, and losing yourself within the wilderness of your mind.