Have you ever been lost—disoriented, panic-stricken, no-idea-where-you-are lost? That’s the theme of Amity Gaige’s latest novel, “Heartwood.” Valerie Gillis, a 42-year old nurse who decides to hike the entire Appalachian trail, gets within 200 miles of the trail’s end in Maine and steps off the trail. We don’t know what prompted her to plunge into a deeply forested area, but Valerie has no compass and can’t figure out which way to walk. She panics. And in her panic, she walks farther into the trees. The trail is gone.

The heart of the novel is a journal Valerie decides to write while she is hoping for rescue. She writes to her mother. Before long, we see she is writing about home, longing, connection, and loss. Her parents fly to Maine and stand by as massive manhunts are assembled by Lieutenant Beverly Miller, a Maine Game Warden with many successful searches to her credit. This one baffles her. After the first 24 hours of searching yields no trace of Gillis, Bev knows that the odds of finding her alive have fallen. 97% of missing persons are found in the first 24 hours.

This statistic is borne out by the case of Pattie Wu-Murad, a Connecticut woman who disappeared in April 2023 during a solo hiking trip around the Kumano Kodo Trail in Japan. An extensive search by U.S. and Japanese teams yielded no trace. Then, in September of 2024, more than a year and a half after she disappeared, a fisherman found her backpack and one hiking shoe near a different trail. On May 9, DNA testing of a femur found near where her backpack had been found proved that it was Wu-Murad’s. How her remains got so far from her original hiking trail is a mystery that may never be solved.

As the search for Valerie progresses, Lt. Bev interviews Valerie’s parents, her husband, who had met up with Valerie every few days on the hike with fresh supplies, and her hiking buddy, a man who had to leave the trail when his father was dying. Everyone they talked with saw “Sparrow,” Valerie’s trail name, as cheerful, enthusiastic and fun to talk to. The days drag on, and hope begins to falter.

Amity Gaige has used letters and journals in two of her previous novels. In “Schroeder,” a story of a father who “kidnaps” his daughter in a custody dispute is told partly in letters Schroeder writes from prison. Gaige also employs a play and poetry in Schroeder. I asked her whether her decision to use unusual formats was a reaction to Jennifer Eagan’s much-discussed use of a powerpoint in “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” but Gaige demurred, telling me by email she just thought the reader would want some “relief.”

“The Sea Wife,” her second novel, is about a family that decides to live on a sailboat for a year. The husband’s point of view is conveyed exclusively through his sea log, another odd choice to convey character (although it does, of course, because she is a terrific writer.)

As Valerie sinks into lethargy and hallucination, her journal entries become sadly poetic. She obsesses about moss. “I wake to wet silence. A rabbit. I am not a moss. I am a woman.”

She sees a white bird morph into a fairy or a really big moth “You’re beautiful.” “Guess what mom? She brings the rain.”

She hallucinates an image of a girl floating down a river who hollers “No excuses.”

“Isn’t it clear no one is coming to save me?” she writes to her mother. The metaphor of heartwood as the essence of the tree also applies to Valerie’s strong connection with her mother:

“Sometimes, in your lap, I would press my hand against your chest so that I could feel the center of you — your heartwood, your innermost substance, like the core of a tree that keeps it standing,”

There are other plot lines in the story, including one involving Lena, a 76-year-old birdwatcher and forager who lives in a Connecticut retirement community. When Lena hears about Valerie on the news, she thinks it might be her estranged daughter Christine, but quickly learns this is not true. We wait, to see how Lena’s story might relate to Valerie’s. Ultimately, Lena discovers a clue that leads the search in an entirely new direction, near a government training facility that has attracted a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Heartwood builds to a race against time, as Lt. Bev follows up on Lena’s tip and then goes tramping in the woods with a search dog. I expected Valerie to be found alive, but feared that Gaige would reject such an ending as a cliché. I’ve heard Gaige interviewed about the ending. She said “I don’t like happy endings, but I do like hopeful endings.” I began to realize that even if Valerie were found alive, she could not return to her prior life. Writing to her mother may have kept her alive, but I felt Valerie needed to find her own heartwood within herself.

As I read Heartwood, I recalled a book I’d read years ago in my book group called “Catherwood,” by Marly Youmans (I gave myself big kudos for remembering the title—it took a few days.)

Set in 1678, the protagonist goes berry picking with her one-year-old daughter and gets lost. The book was written in 1996 and I still recall it as terrifying. Here are some lines from “Catherwood,” which reminded me of how Valerie must have felt:

Torquelike, fear encircled her throat with its dull constant pressure. On their seventh day in the forest, Catherwood could no longer believe that Gabriel would find them, or that she would discover herself on the doorstep of home. For six days she had wandered in circles, trying to cross the path.

. . .

Hunger kept pace with her, and in her back was a dull wearying pain.But her arms and legs strengthened, so she could walk for almost a mile without putting the baby down. Yet however muscular and lean she became, fear still clasped her throat.

“Catherwood” also employs poetic reverie. After she finds a trapper who is too ill to speak and who dies the next day, she looks up:

The floor of heaven was littered with stars. Now Selene the moon peeped at a bloated dead man and a sleeping child, curled in her mother's lap, at a mother siting very straight with firelight reflected in her unblinking eyes. And though the moon shone on town and country alike, and though it seemed she could have told them where the tiny English settlements were flung down in the wilderness, she was stone dead and cold and could not speak.

I also read “In the House in the Dark of the Woods,” by Laird Hunt, also about a woman getting lost in the woods, ironically also while picking berries. It’s called an “ingenious horror story set in colonial New England,” but is very different from “Catherwood.”

In this narrative, the woman, called Goody in the story, meets strange women in the forest who shape shift, change from friend to foe, and lead her deeper and deeper into trying to decipher what they want or how she can get out. In part because of the evil fairy tale device, the novel loses some of the true horror of someone being lost without a soul in sight.

“In the House in the Dark of the Woods” reminded me of a short piece I wrote about getting lost with a girl scout troop. I was a girl scout leader, my misguided attempt to get to know my new neighborhood by volunteering with children. I had no children. I thought I could control a group of ten year old girls, not realizing that they could smell my inexperience like moldy gym clothes left too long in a locker.

The ending mimics the fairy-tale concepts used in “In the House in the Dark of the Woods.”

They were lost. They could see the tower like a mirage high on the mountain ahead of them, but they’d lost the trail. The plucky young woman with a can-do attitude realized the last time she’d seen a bright orange blaze on a tree signifying the trail had been 20 minutes ago. The trees swayed in a circle, taunting them. You’re lost in a forest and you didn’t drop any crumbs. Did you hear that? Hear what?

The girls grumbled, Miss, Miss, where are we? When are we going to get there. We’re hungry. They’d already eaten their lunches at 10:30 in the morning, complaining then that they were hungry when they were really just bored. Poor planning. She saw it now. Now at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, they were tired, hungry and afraid. My mother will be missing me, one said in a small voice. An undertone of assent.

Nearby, a small brook, what looked like the remnants of a stone wall. Watercress climbing its sides. A strong gurgling sound as if a wave were coming over the rise. Girls, maybe not such a good idea—Too late. Scooped up water to cool their faces. Drank deep. Munched watercress. “Ohh. Bitter.” Let’s sit and have a small rest. They crumpled, backs against slender saplings, heads turned down like flowers wilted. You were supposed to take care of us.

She decided to bush whack her way up the hill to see if she could reconnect with a trail. Stay here girls. An hour later, when she finally found the spot again, the backpacks were all sitting where they left them, but the girls were gone. Above her, she saw a flock of geese, heading north towards the tower and honking a wild rebellious call.

**

I didn’t really lose my girl scouts, although I’m sure they lost their confidence in me. It wasn’t long before the higher-ups at Girl Scouts advised I might be happier volunteering in administration.

Jenna Bush selected “Heartwood” for her reading group, so I suspect lots of readers will be responding to it. I still favor “Schroeder” as Gaige’s best, mostly because he is such an enigmatic, egotistical, clever character (he’s writing a book about “pauses” in literature) who obviously loves the daughter he kidnaps. And we get to see various facets of his personality, including his escape from East Berlin and his attempt to create a persona as a “real” American. (He renames himself Eric Kennedy.)

For the best novel about getting lost in the woods, read “Catherwood.” There is no warden, no manhunts, no conspiracy theories or estranged family members. By keeping the story in the woods, Youmans makes us feel there’s no way out. Which is precisely the point.