A couple of weeks ago, my family took a quick getaway to our family camp in Maine and my 15-year-old announced that he’d forgotten his book.
“It’s okay,” I announced. “I packed Born a Crime by Trevor Noah for you!”
I know in my bones he will like this book, but, for maybe the ninth time, he refused to read it.
“I want fantasy.” He’d just finished Ender’s Game, for maybe the ninth time.
“I’ll find you something,” I said, ever up for a reading challenge, and I turned to the cabin’s shelves. Every book I held up for his inspection he’d either read or had no interest in reading, until we’d exhausted all of the sci-fi fantasy options in the house.
“I guess I could read a mystery,” he said. I studied my options.
I slid The Guide by Peter Heller off the shelf. I read the description and thought it might be an option for my son, but decided I would read the first few pages to see.
And I kept reading, soon moving out to the dock, to sit in the sun and the quiet. Peter Heller has an incredible ability to write about nature with a kind of reverence that stuns in its beauty and specificity. The guide of the title is a fisherman, newly arrived to work as a river guide at a high-end lodge in Colorado in a near future when a pandemic continues to wreak havoc on world populations and nature retreats are now the preferred vacations for the ultra-wealthy. He’s overcoming a tragedy in his past (as told in The River, which I do recommend reading first if only for the joy of reading as much Peter Heller as possible and in the proper order) and also quickly realizes something fishy (pun absolutely intended) is going on at the resort. Heller leans into the language specific to fly-fishing and rivers and Colorado and it is its own kind of poetry.
Simultaneously, a thriller is afoot. Our guide gets paired to fish with a woman who has just arrived and also happens to be a famous singer. Together, as they explore the river, they also investigate some of the strange occurrences at the lodge and discover all is not as idyllic as it seems.
Three hours later, I turned the last page. Yes, I loved the book. Just as joyous was that particular feeling of discovery—and the knowledge that Peter Heller has more books I can read. The Last Ranger, about an enforcement ranger in Yellowstone who loves wolves more than people, is freshly out in paperback, and Burn arrives on August 13th, Heller’s newest novel, about two men who emerge from a camping trip in the rural woods of Maine to discover the world has turned into a dystopian country racked with violence.
Heller returns to similar themes again and again: the beauty of nature, male friendship, dystopian futures, the surprising violence of strangers. But he makes each book feel fresh and propulsive.
“I wouldn’t mind if the book were part of a series,” my son said.
Right! Back to the task at hand. The Guide had a certain adult sensibility I wasn’t quite ready to put in my teen son’s hands. Instead, I pulled The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths off the shelf, the start of a cozy mystery series and an old favorite about an archeologist in Norwich, England who gets pulled into helping the local police solve a cold case after bones are discovered in the salt marshes. He liked it well enough that I just ordered book two in the series for him.
One of the many reasons I have the best job in the world is that in helping others find books they’ll love, I also find my own. They’re not always one and the same.
Hannah Harlow is owner of The Book Shop, an independent bookstore in Beverly Farms. Harlow writes semi-regular recommendations for our readers. See more of what she recommends reading at thecricket.com.
