NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars comes the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip—a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence.
"A fiery tour de force … I could not put this book down. It truly was terrifying and unutterably beautiful."—The Denver Post
Wynn and Jack have been best friends since college orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey.
One night, with the fire advancing, they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank; the next day, a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the same man they heard? And if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.
This is 3.5 for me but it’s most likely because I was expecting an intense thriller and as another reviewer put it, it’s more of a “slow burn”. It’s a good book. I read it in two days and a typical book takes me about 10 days to read. It’s just different than what I was hoping for. As I read it I couldn’t stop picturing it as a movie. I think there was a movie with Kevin Bacon and Meryl Streep where the whole movie is on a river. There was a little too much description about what the boys were eating, or packed or how they did this and that. All that being said, I enjoyed it. I’m glad I read it. I do like to read different types of books and this was a nice departure from the last 3 books I’ve read.
