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The best description I can come up with for my mind-bending experience I had with this book can be summed up in the words of Jerry Garcia: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” I had initially agreed to review The Hike with no small amount of trepidation, fearing that it might be too “weird” for my tastes. Can you blame me, though? I don’t even how I’ll do my usual novel summary for this review, because pretty sure anything I say will sound like the mad ramblings of someone on a bad acid trip, but here goes nothing: Four lifelong friends embark on a challenging 4-day hike in Norway, each with their own secrets and personal issues. Some are more eager to get on the trail than others, but when they hear about a missing girl who looks strikingly similar to Maggie, things take a sinister twist. It is very hard to pull off any kind of story where the entire plot is built on doing things the reader does not expect. Because eventually you're going to find a rhythm and start anticipating the surprises, right? But somehow Magary manages to gradually explain the structure of his book to you and still catch you off guard on a regular basis. This is a really exciting and twisty thriller from the start to the end which will leaving you wanting to hike in Norway too.
From the author of The Postmortal, a fantasy saga unlike any you’ve read before, weaving elements of folk tales and video games into a riveting, unforgettable adventure of what a man will endure to return to his family The people are welcoming although somewhat aloof in the small village of Norway and give the ladies instructions and advice with some warnings of dangers they could encounter while hiking. At times they feel they are not alone and being watched by an unseen, creepy presence. The women aren't prepared to find themselves discovering something very bad that places them in great danger if found out while at the same time two of the women have been harboring painful secrets which will affect the group but only one will reveal a secret so ugly and shameful that it could cause a breakdown in the friendships or it could possibly cost one woman her life! Every year, Liz Wallace and her three best friends travel the globe to recharge and reconnect. This year, it was her chance to choose where to go. Battling problems in her marriage plus burn out at work, Liz decides it’s time to take the trip she’s been dreaming of ever since she was a child: hiking the Norwegian trails. Thank you to Lucy Clarke, G.P. Putnam's Sons, and NetGalley for a complimentary copy. All opinions are my own. Bookshelves is one feature of OnlineBookClub.org; Bookshelves is found under the forums.onlinebookclub.org/shelves/ subfolder at OnlineBookClub.org. Bookshelves is only one of many features at OnlineBookClub.org. OnlineBookClub.org has many other features too.
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With Nordic folklore touches and a friendship group holding onto guilt and secrets, it was no surprise to me that The Hike was an instant, could-put-down win for me. It starts out with one of the best opening sentences and from there it is as twisty as you think it will be. Who's body is on the mountainside? What are the four best friends keeping from one another? And why do they keep seeing people from the small Norwegian town on the mountain after they've been told there's a storm? They lace up their hiking boots for the adventure of a lifetime in the Norwegian wilderness: a place of towering mountains, glass-like lakes, log cabins and forests stolen from a fairytale. It's the perfect place to lose yourself - until a broken body is found at the bottom of a ravine. Typically, I prefer my stories to have a semblance of structure, as opposed to, say, just a random string of events thrown together—which was initially how this book came across. But just as I was starting to really regret my choice, Crab happened. Yes, Crab. To explain would be to give up spoilers, so all I’ll say is that my time with Crab changed everything. By the end of Part I of The Hike I wanted to cry. The revelation revealed there made me understand something about this book, like maybe there’s actually some rhythm to this madness, or maybe the madness is just the point. The end may not be what you expect it to be. I expected an analogy. I did not get one, not exactly anyway. Yeah well, expecting is like assuming, and we all know that little saying about the word assume. One more thing to share: There came a point, near the end, that I couldn’t help but picture George Bailey running down the street of Bedford Falls yelling, ”Hello Emporium! Hello, you old Building and Loan!” Happy button engaged. Enough said.
It was pretty funny. Laugh out loud in a couple spots and I'm not a laugh-out-louder (laugher-out-loud?) To be fantasy, you must have magic. To have magic, you must have the mundane (that which is not magic). This book does not have the mundane. Therefore it does not have magic and is not fantasy; I would probably describe it as surrealist. Not a complaint, really, just an observation. We'll get to the complaints in a minute.Thanks to the author, Penguin Group Putnam and NetGalley for the ARC. I am voluntarily leaving my honest review* As I'm reading I can't wait for the psychological twist, when I go "ahhh there it is, this is so great" moment. Sadly to say I didn't get it. However the story was a good, although a little unbelievable, I mean who leaves their phone behind when going on a hiking trip?! Seriously that is beyond stupid and they all deserved to die, ok die is a little extreme, but they should definitely never procreate. Amazing. If any of you are looking for a pure adventure of unrivaled creativity and depth transformed from utter normality to strangeness and then topped off with a great ethical and moral conclusion topped off at the end, delivered with a really strong emotional punch to the gut, then look no further. This book also does not have a plot. A plot relies on some measure of cause and effect. "The queen died and then the king died," is not a plot. "The queen died and so the king died of grief," is a plot. But nothing in this damn book happens because of anything else. Things just happen, one after another, and mostly these things are quite unpleasant. They don't have a great deal of meaning though, even when it is revealed that they are coming from the protagonist's own subconscious (a twist that any reader with half a brain will have seen coming from a mile away), because they are always devoid of consequences. Eight novels in and Lucy Clarke just keeps getting better. The Hike is easily my favourite Lucy Clarke novel to date. I love a good isolated thriller mystery novel and The Hike is a fabulous example of a destination thriller. Fans of Lucy Clarke and newcomers will lap this one up in no time at all.
This is my second experience of Susi Holliday's work, having previously read and enjoyed "The Last Resort". I was looking forward to being equally impressed by "The Hike" and the premise and the accompanying marketing blurb gave me every reason to hope that I would enjoy it just as much. But, unfortunately, I didn't. Well, let me explain. This is well written. Really well written. Magary is brilliant at descriptions, I love his sense of humor and I like his writing style. It's also worth saying, this book has the best ending I've read all year. Honestly it's the best one in recent memory. An ending that is both incredibly satisfying and a total gut punch. I heard a few rumblings about The Hike from people I trust so I ignored the blurb that made it sound like not really my thing. (A man who'll do anything to return to his family? Snooze.) No offense to the marketing team of this book but you should avoid reading the summary. Completely. Here is what you need to know about this book: you never know what will happen next.More than a week later and I'm still trying to figure what exactly I read here. Here's what I know: I received a gifted advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review as part of the book tour hosted by Insta Book Tours.
The Hike does for casual hiking what Jaws did for swimming in the ocean. . . . An existential, metaphysical journey into what would happen if you ended up in an alternate universe that challenged everything you thought you knew about yourself.” Edit: looking over this, I'm kinda super spoilery in this review so honestly, don't read the spoiler tags. Go into this without knowing. Resist the urge. It will be so much better that way.) In this literary odyssey, Magary combines fascinating dream imagery, assorted video game tropes, and a story structure that’s deliberately predictable (with nods to many other tales of wandering through strange lands before returning home) but still surprising.” At this point in my review, I actually had several more paragraphs planned. After some consideration, I nixed them. It was going to boil down to more commentary on why The Hike was so weird and wonderful, and why despite its kookiness I still enjoyed it a lot. I realized given the circumstances of this book, that’s all immaterial. It’ll either work or it won’t, and I don’t want to run the risk of potentially predisposing would-be readers if I make further attempts to describe its themes or to compare the story to something else, because any more would be revealing and that would remove a lot of the magic. Horrible characters can be cool. See Anti-Heroes. These characters are stupid, terrible, and straight up ridiculous. If you identify with any of the 4 main characters you should take a long deep long at yourself. Horrible characters can be interesting. These are just HORRIBLE characters. Caricatures of characters real authors have created.
From the author of The Postmortal, a fantasy saga unlike any you’ve read before, weaving elements of folk tale and video game into a riveting, unforgettable adventure of what a man will endure to return to his family She wrote this odd way a couple of times I spotted that is just not how anybody speaks, as in, ".....they're reserved for the participants to tell, are they not ?" and, "That's what you really wanted, was it not ?"I spotted some apostrophe errors, she missed a few question marks and she wrote straight and not strait-laced. 'Cat been stunned' lost the word had but that was way better error-wise than the first book I read by her, which was good to see. The illustrations and post-modern elements throughout this story definitely add to the story’s engagement and excitement. It was interesting to see the graphic novel-like speech bubbles combined with the layering of the illustrations like a notebook. Throughout the story there are notes and comments layers over the action like an observation journal. There are also mes-en-abymes sprinkled throughout the illustrations of the character’s own observation notebooks! I loved the idyllic Swiss Alps setting in this story. Somewhere so beautiful but can also be so dangerous. Cat, Ginny and their husbands aren’t experienced hikers but the route they take should be a fairly easy one. In an interview, the author shared how she had been on a hike in Norway, when she started to think about writing this novel. She said…
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