Lost on the Appalachian Trail
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On The Today Show, host Jenna Hager Bush has a book club. Heartwood was her choice for April, 2025. This novel by Amity Gaige is a tale of survival. It is about a hiker on the Appalachian Trail who goes missing, and about the search for her that ensues.
In an interview, the author tells us that she was inspired to write the book after learning about Geraldine Largay, a retired nurse, who disappeared from the trail in 2013. It took two years for her remains to be found. Alongside her body, a journal was found as well. It contained letters she had written to her family.
Thus, Heartwood starts with a letter. It takes a while to figure out who is writing it and why, but ultimately, we learn that it is written by Valerie Gillis, a 42-year-old hiker, who has gotten lost. Her letters are sprinkled throughout the novel and they are all written to her mother. The letters also help us understand how burned out she is as a nurse who was one of the “heroes” of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Alternating with Valerie’s letters are chapters about two other women, Lt. Bev and Lena. Bev is a game warden with the Maine Warden Service. She tells us that several dozen thru-hikers get lost every season. She has been in the business of finding them for thirty years.
And then there is Lena, a seventy-six-year-old woman in a nursing home. She is an odd duck. Or as the author says, “She has been called, in various registers of respect, an ‘original,’ a ‘square peg,’ an ‘acquired taste.’” She does not have friends in the facility except for Warren, a gentleman who adores her.
Lena has been reading all of her life. Her current favorite subgenre is memoirs of outdoor catastrophes. She is also tech savvy and hangs out in reddit groups pursuing her interest of foraging. And she is closely following the search efforts for Valerie Gillis in the news. Indeed, when she first heard of the lost 42-year-old nurse, she feared it was her own daughter from whom she is estranged.
There is a third mother/daughter story to follow in the book and it is Bev’s tangled relationship with her own mother. When Janet and Wayne Gillis come to Maine to participate in the search for their daughter, Bev gets close to Janet as she simultaneously neglects phone messages about her own mom who is in hospice care.
This book then, is not just about Valerie’s physical lostness but also about the lostness we might feel in significant relationships and in other aspects of our lives. And as Bev and Lena work on their situations, we get some ideas of how we might work on our own.
An engrossing read + life lessons to carry away from reading it…to me, that makes this a terrific book.
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Click here to learn more about Heartwood on Amazon.
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Here are three things I would like to tell you in closing:
- You might also be interested in my review of this non-fiction account of a search for three lost hikers on the Pacific Coast Trail: Trail of the Lost by Andrea Lankford.
- Also, here is the review I wrote for another book by Amity Gaige: Schroder.
- And finally, if you have seen photos of me, you know I like to change up my reading glasses with some regularity. Look at these cute ones on Amazon.
Best regards, Lorie
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