Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Adventure or your worst nightmare?
The River At Night
What you need to know before your trail
Win, Pia, Sandra and Rachel have been friends for years and despite living busy lives, they make a point of meeting up and having some sort of holiday. Take a break from their stressful lives and chill out. Of course, when they get back into their humdrum lives, these memories are what lingers..
Win this year wants a quieter holiday as she’s just suffered her marriage breaking down and the death of her brother. Pia however has other ideas and want to dial the adventure up instead of down. Pia gets her way and organises an adventure holiday involving white water rafting in the Maine wilderness
This can only go one way can’t it? In the middle of the forest, no one can hear you scream…
Travel Guide
Allagash and the Maine wilderness
Allagash is described as ’an outpost community at the entry to Maine’s vast private forestlands‘
The beauty versus the danger
As with any remote area, sometimes it can be so overpowering and awe inspiring that people forget the dangers. This is raw, remote and visceral land. The shadows in the middle of the woods are dark any time day or night. There are often very strange sounds coming from the forest at night. What kind of animals can be causing them?
As the friends drive further into the wilderness and further away from civilisation, they see both the stunning scenery and realise just how isolated they are going to be. The stunning landscape however is jaw dropping for now:
‘As we climbed higher, the hardwoods thinned out, and we wandered among shoulder-high fir and spruce. Soon even the conifers fell away. Above the tree line now, we walked on bedrock, scree kicking back behind us. Fairy green, lichen jeweled, stone outcroppings..The view stunned me, and I gasped. I don’t know why I was surprised to find such beauty.’
And then there’s the white water rafting. Imagine having such a good time on the Maine rivers and really getting to see the landscape? You can of course do this very differently from how they do it in the book – Maine is the place for adventure!
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
If I ever go on an adventure holiday or whitewater rafting, I am going to take lessons from this book. Never go with this lot for a start. I do love a book that takes me out of my comfort zone and into an area of wilderness I’ve never been to before. The middle of Maine in this instance with the noise of the rapids,the rustle of the trees, the damp smell of the soil. I swear the language got so descriptive and vivid, I could hear the water crashing and smacking the side of the jagged rocks.
This outdoors is not a walk in the park funnily enough but more of a feral beast – a group of women go out there but only one has the sense of adventure it would seem. I thought it might go a bit Lord of the Flies and I held my breath…Honestly when the white water rafting scenes were in full flow so to speak I even held my breath.
Another tip I picked up from here is not to have the same guide the girls did. Not exactly Bear Grylls. A bit of a maverick and dangerous with it.
The trouble with water and forests is that you never really know what could happen, nature can turn on you in the blink of an eye. You can get lost really easily if you’re not careful and you never really know who else or what else is might be out there.
The tension in this novel was palpable for me as the crushing noise of the water -and the fine mist of the falls, the bugs and other surprises only a forest can bring. There’s something very unforgiving about books set in a forest and the location and setting were evoked with panache and skill. If you play the sounds of waterfalls as you read this book it would be the ultimate reading experience! The fear creeps long with you as you know something bad is going to happen…..
A tense and well paced novel. There were a few moments when the sense of disbelief got caught in the branches of those big spindly trees however and I admit to wanting to slap one of the characters to bring her to her senses. They wouldn’t last two seconds in the real world so just as well this was fiction.
It’s not just in space but in the middle of the Maine wilderness where no one can hear you scream.
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: The River at Night
Author/Guide: Erica Ferencik Destination: Allagash, Maine Departure Time: 2000s
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