Kingdomtide

October 7, 2019
Curtis’s intense debut pairs two narratives, one of which is better realized than the other. The more urgent and successful story is that of feisty 72-year-old Cloris Waldrip, a staple of the Methodist church in the little town in the Texas Panhandle where she and her husband of 54 years live. On their way to a fishing vacation in Montana in 1986, their tiny plane crashes. The plane’s pilot and Cloris’s husband are killed, leaving her stranded in the wilderness of the Bitterroot Mountains. Her grueling attempt to survive and escape is depicted with vivid urgency. She becomes an object of obsession for forest ranger Debra Lewis and a small crew of misfits who help her with the search. While Lewis does her best to locate Cloris, whom she is convinced against all evidence is still alive, she is hampered by a bureaucracy that doesn’t want to devote any more money to the search. As a result, she spends much less time searching than downing bottle after bottle of merlot, suffering through a dysfunctional sexual relationship with a search-and-rescue guy brought in for the hunt, and lusting after the guy’s troubled teenage daughter. Cloris’s gritty, nightmarish story, as well as her strong voice and personality, will make her a reader favorite. Though uneven, this story of survival will keep readers quickly turning the pages.