Narrated by Courtney Patterson
Spoilers Ahoy.
I did not like and therefore did not finish Deep in the Alaskan Woods. Here are some reasons why I thought the book was bonkers. The narration was okay though.
1. Alexandra Collister is a vet tech who is engaged to a vet at the practice where she works. As the book begins, Lyle (the vet fiancé) arrives at Alex’s apartment after a holiday he took to Scotland with his buddies and demonstrates controlling behaviours which culminate in an assault and attempted rape. Alex breaks off the engagement (good) and realises she must leave her job and when Lyle’s behaviour continues to escalate, that she decides she needs to leave her life.
2. She decides to go and visit her twin cousins who run a lodge in the wilds of Alaska. She has not seen them since she all but severed their relationship when – as best I can tell from the timeline – she was about 13 years old, about the time she found out that she, too, was a twin but that her twin died in utero. It’s a case of “vanishing twin syndrome”; a real thing – I looked it up – where early ultrasound shows more than one fetus but later ones show only one. The “vanished” fetus is absorbed either by the mother’s body, the placenta or the surviving twin. What didn’t make sense was that Alex’s mother apparently knew (how??) she was having twin girls and that the vanished twin was Alison (again, HOW??). After finding this out, Alex felt envious of the twin connection of her cousins and has felt ongoing grief and sadness at the loss of her twin. Alex sometimes looks in the mirror and wonders if she sees Alison staring back. She sometimes thinks Alison is talking to her. Um… what??
3. Approximately a week after the attempted rape, Alex arrives in Alaska where she meets up with her cousins – one of whom is a widow whose husband died in a light plane crash. She has a small child, Chip, who is not coping with the death of his dad and thinks anything unusual is a sign from his father.
4. At the lodge she meets Quinn Mantell, aka “Q-Man” who is a Bear Grylls-type character (except, one hopes, he does not routinely drink urine as Bear so often seems to do and also that Quinn does not have a military background). Quinn was taught tracking and survival by his best friend’s father, and together, he and Sam (the best friend) run a school to pass that knowledge on. Quinn also has a TV show. Of course Quinn has his own tragic past (everyone in this book has a tragic past – it was really too much) – when he was seven, he ran ahead of his dad and Scotty dog and hid in the woods; then they searched for him they were both attacked and killed by a bear. This is weird for a number of reasons – Quinn is still pretty emotional about the whole thing – he gets teary when he remembers his little dog – but I couldn’t quite square that with his chosen career – in bear territory. He does not like and is scared of bears. It seemed an odd choice to stay in the area and do what he does. The narrative never really explained the disconnect. What’s worse, though, is that Quinn never mentions the death of his dad without also mentioning the dog and there are times when only the dog gets a mention. I was left with the impression that the dog was at least equally, if not more important in Quinn’s life than his dad was, which – weird.
5. There’s another tragic backstory and this is even weirder. Sam and his wife Mary run the training camp with Quinn. Sam and Mary have been trying for a long time to have children and Mary has at last fallen pregnant. Mary “…still misses her grandparents who died in the Falls Lake flood”, particularly her grandmother who raised her (this is important). This is what the book has to say about that flood and, most importantly, when it occurred (I thought I’d misheard so I spent an hour going back and forth and checking):
“Nearly a century ago, the waterfall had been blocked by several tumbled boulders that made the water level lower and finally disappear for forty-some years. Then a rockslide had opened the path for mountain snowmelt to feed the lake again. She recalled hearing that the years it was a small, dry, lake bed, a pioneer town had sprung up there and had later been buried by tons of water.
Lives and property were lost, ended, obliterated, buried. Later, a new town of Falls Lake had sprang up a few miles away and had been there for nearly fifty years.”
What??? How old is this woman to be having her first baby??
6. Alex has only just escaped a terrible relationship and it was beyond belief to me that she would be in any state to embark upon a new one so quickly but within less than two weeks that’s exactly what happens. The book ends (I skipped ahead because I had a suspicion which was thankfully unfounded about who the murderer was – oh yeah, there’s a murder -) when Mary is only showing a small baby bump so the entire books takes place in perhaps three to four months. Nevertheless, Alex and Quinn are happily engaged by book’s end.
7. The writing was overwrought and over the top. There was too much going on and not enough time spent developing character. There was a lot of info-dumpy dialogue. It was the equivalent of the “villain’s monologue/motive rant” except it was all over the book and with just about every character.
8. I listened up to Chapter 20 and then skipped ahead to the last 2 chapters so I listened to just over half the book all up (not counting the re-listens of the earlier chapters to make sure I hadn’t misheard Mary’s backstory). I could not bring myself to continue.
9. The narration, by Courtney Patterson, was better than the book but there were times when her performance was more overwrought than even the text suggested. For example, on some occasions Ms. Patterson was panting in breathless exertion (fear, excitement, etc) but the words being spoken at the time did not call for any of that. That said, there were far more times when the dialogue was cheesy and OTT and I’m not sure anyone could do much better with it than Ms. Patterson did.
10. The character voices and pitch were good though and I think I’d like Ms. Patterson’s narration in a book I enjoyed.
Kaetrin
Buy Deep in the Alaskan Woods by Karen Harper on Amazon
