Annie and Pete have been best friends since they were little. They know each other better than anyone, and they’ve been on more adventures than they can count–they even have a notebook filled with all the times they’ve almost died. But they always survive, because together, they’re invincible.

And they’ve always been just friends. But lately, Annie has been thinking that maybe friendship is just the beginning, and she’s been mentally replaying all the times they were almost something more.

Now they’re heading out on their next great quest: a ten-day backpacking trip through the mountains of Washington State, ending at Fire Camp, where they’ll learn to fight the area’s growing wildfire problem. The woods spark with the promise of adventure, but a freak climbing accident interrupts their progress, and as the wildfires close in and smoke envelops them, Annie and Pete wander farther from the trail. Carrie Mac’s gripping story of the power of unrequited love and the danger of the elements is harrowing, beautiful, and unforgettable.

Thank you so much to Netgalley for this ARC! I have a huge soft spot for the untamed bits of the world, and always have. I feel more at home in the woods than anywhere else, but despite this longing to be away from the city and the people in it, I don’t really do much hiking or camping or anything of the like. I’d like to say it’s because I don’t have opportunities to, but mostly it is out of sheer laziness and lack of training than anything else. So, I love to immerse myself in stories like these, especially ones with such an emotional through-line. This story gives you the breath of the wild but also a constant ache throughout of grief and hurt, and finding your way through the wilderness that is YOU.

We meet Annie and Pete as the novel kicks off; two best friends who have formed a bond through shared trauma. The two are the sole members of the Dead Moms Club, and have also started a notebook full of times when they have almost died together. These things have stitched them together and solidified their roles as soulmates to the other, but anything besides a platonic relationship has mostly been left unexplored. When tragedy erupts once more for Annie, Pete makes plans for them both to hike to Fire Camp: an educational summer program dedicated to fighting wildfires, which are raging in spades in this timeline. He hopes this will get her mind off of her grief and remind her how to live. Things go well, at first, until a seemingly small wound causes irrevocable damage to Pete. Thus Annie is forced to make incredibly hard decisions, and confronts all of the feelings she has been pushing down all of her life. Feelings about her family, about Pete, and about herself.

There is a lot of heart to this novel, and it really speaks to the profound ache of loss that never really goes away. Pete and Annie are both broken in their own way, but they bring out the best in each other and keep the other standing upright at their most vulnerable. What the book ends up teaching you though, is that the strength to persevere is inside of you, and though having a support system is incredibly important, sometimes the only way to find your way out of the darkness that has encompassed your mind is by wading through it on your own. Everyone deals with sorrow in their own way, and I think Carrie does a lovely job of exploring that through all of these characters, and not just Pete and Annie. We see their fathers coping with the loss of their wives, a grandmother coming to terms with her own mortality, a girlfriend saying goodbye the only way she knows how, and other tertiary characters wading through life as best they can.

I thoroughly enjoyed this tale of survival, and the message it clings to: don’t give up. Bad things happen to good people every day with no rhyme or reason, and I know that I myself struggle with wanting to fix things in others. We want our loved ones to be happy, but sometimes all we can do is just stand strong with them as they make their own journey through the woods. I think Pete is a wonderful example of that, and Annie is the epitome of inner power. Perhaps the wildfire is our own misery; sometimes we can feel it closing in, hot on our trail, and with smoke so thick we can’t breathe. There is a way out, though, and you’re strong enough to find it. Reading a novel like this will remind you of that fact, so if you need a little boost, I recommend picking this one up.

5/5 stars