A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw ~ Book Review

Mystery
My Rating: 🍪🍪.5

A History of Wild Places starts by introducing the disappearance of Maggie St. James and Travis Wren, a detective who went looking for her. It picks up years later in a culty commune called Pastoral when one of the members discovers Travis’s abandoned truck just outside the community’s boundaries – where no one is supposed to venture to avoid bringing in disease. Thus begins the slow questioning of the community and what its members have been told to believe about the world beyond.

I found this book to be pretty slow for a mystery. It mainly followed the daily lives of several members of Pastoral. There was a decent amount of ‘world-building’ to acclimatize the reader to the culture of Pastoral, which felt overdone to me. It felt like the way the inhabitants were being controlled was repeated over and over and it was unclear why none of them seemed to notice or care.

Although I finished the book and was interested in hearing the ultimate truth about Maggie and Travis, it kind of just ended up where I would have expected it to, which fell flat.

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