How to Survive in the Woods sounded like a wilderness survival thriller, but the woods turn out to be the least of Emma Sharp’s problems.
Emma is married to Logan, a controlling husband she wants to leave. Then she becomes friendly with his ex-girlfriend Taylor and the two women come up with a fairly drastic solution. They will take Logan hiking through Maine’s remote Hundred Mile Wilderness, and he may not be coming home.
The clever part is that Emma is not someone who has suddenly found herself completely out of her depth. Raised by a doomsday prepper, she knows how to survive in the wilderness. She can read the terrain, find water and look after herself. What she is much less certain about is the two people walking beside her.
Once the three of them are deep in the woods, the tension becomes less about physical survival and more about who is actually in control. There is a plan, but it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whose plan it really is.
I liked the premise and the wilderness setting works particularly well. Putting three people with this much history between them somewhere isolated, where there is no easy way out, gives the story plenty of room to twist.
My reservation was the characters. Emma is interesting enough to carry the book, but Logan and Taylor never felt quite as fully developed. At times I was more interested in finding out what was going to happen than I was worried about what happened to them.
That did not stop me reading. Rosenfield keeps shifting the balance between the three characters just enough to make you question who you should believe and where the story is heading.
A good, twisty thriller with an excellent setting and a clever premise, even if I would have liked the people at the centre of it to have had a little more depth.
OUR RATING: 4/5
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