Author: Jess Walter
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 277 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (WA, ID)
Summary: Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.
Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?
Review: I got this novel on the recommendation of another book blogger, and I am so glad. It pulled me in from page 1. It feels timely with the conflict within the family about religion (think "Christian Nationalism"), politics, and conspiracy theories.
This novel was not what I thought it was going to be when I started it. It got quite a bit darker, more violent, and more... deep. Yes, there are characters who are members of a crazy Christian militia in a rural area of Idaho, but there is also a family clawing their way back from ruin, trying to find one another and figure out how to be a family.
I really warmed to the Kinnick character, who had disappeared from regular life in order to avoid things that are difficult. The levity of his trying to use a cell phone and to remember how to drive a car was a nice balance to the other characters, who are wielding guns and spewing hate under the cover of religion.
My description makes this book sound like it's all dark and violent, but that isn't how it felt when I was reading it. I really feel for the various family members who are struggling to figure out who they are and how they all feel about each other, and how they can come together again. It's rough and misplaced love.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Bookish--the main character is a journalist, and books are what connect him and his granddaughter
- Literary Escapes--Washington
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