Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > The Wilderwomen

I’ve sat here staring at my laptop screen for a bit, trying to think of the best way to start out this book review because I just can’t stay away from the word “ineffable” when it comes to this book. When I pull away from the intricacies and intimacies of the story and look at it from afar, it’s just something so enigmatic and beautiful I simply don’t know where to start with it.

Why don’t I try starting with the plot, boiled down to its base elements? This book is, at its roots, a Great American Road Trip novel. It’s the story of two sisters who decide to set out and find their mother, who has been missing for five years, and now that they’re both adults they decide to find out once and for all what her fate was, because they think they have the tools to do so. This wouldn’t be a special book at all if it weren’t for the sheer, raw talent and imagination of Ruth Emmie Lang.

Characters and atmosphere are what drive this book, and both are magnificent engines. I’d say atmosphere carries slightly more weight than the characters, but that may be due to the fact that Lang’s mesmerizing, earnest, and almost hypnotic prose lends the atmosphere strength, while only half of characterization is carried by prose (the rest being carried by heartfelt, well-written, and sometimes heartbreakingly vulnerable dialogue).

The themes of sisterhood, motherhood, guilt, shame, secrets, and regret are all central to this book, overlaid with mystical melodies surrounding memory, music, birds, and migration. These themes and literary melodies are where the book gets ineffable for me, because I feel I could write a whole essay about how memory, music, birds, and migration patterns all tie into one another, but that would never fit into a book review. This one is running long as it is.

Our two main characters, Finn and Zadie, are both wonderful and heartbreaking to read, with their opposite worldviews and personalities. If you have a sister you might know that feeling of simultaneously wanting to hug them and throttle them but you’ll do whatever it takes to keep them safe. When it comes to their disparate world views regarding their missing mother, you can also see that big sister/little sister dynamic in action as they both regard their mother and her actions in different ways, memories and emotions colored differently by their age when the events happened and whether or not they were there when certain things happened. It causes strife and discord as Zadie tries to shield and protect Finn from what happened in the last six months their mother was around before she disappeared, but it’s hard to stop those protective instincts, and you can feel the weight of Zadie’s emotions regarding the matter.

Yes, I cried.

There are fabulous interludes throughout the book as Zadie and Finn travel from Texas to Washington in their endeavor to find their mom, from stargazing in Arizona to communing with trees in the Cascades. Every new supporting character that’s brought into the story contributes something significant to the story and never takes away from the plot or feels like filler material. It’s just one more stepping stone and one more mile to go.

I simply loved it. Everything about it. It was compelling from the first sentence, reeling me in immediately and it kept me captivated to the very end. It won’t disappoint you.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for granting me access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.

File Under: Coming of Age/Magical Realism/New Adult/Mystery