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.

October 15, 2019
A bitterly unhappy forest ranger finds a purpose in her search for an old woman who might have survived disaster in this darkly humorous debut novel. In 1986, a small plane crashes on a blue-sky day into a peak in the Bitterroot National Forest, a 1.6-million-acre wilderness straddling Montana and Idaho. The only survivor is 72-year-old Cloris Waldrip, who's on vacation with her husband of 54 years. Alone and traumatized, she's determined to make her way home to Texas. At the start she's a nice Methodist lady who pulls up her stockings and retrieves her handbag from the wreckage before setting off down the mountain, but her civilized layers will be peeled away by weeks, then months of harsh conditions and loneliness. Bitterroot forest ranger Debra Lewis is recently divorced (after finding out her husband had two other wives--"He's in prison for trigamy") and hell-bent on drinking herself to death. But finding Cloris, who she believes survived the crash, becomes her mission. Through it she meets a widowed search-and-rescue specialist named Steven Bloor and his sullen teenage daughter, Jill. Chapters recounting Cloris' struggle to survive alternate with those describing Lewis' search and her entanglement with the Bloors. Cloris' chapters are by turns thrilling, poignant, and hilarious, carried along by her irresistible first-person narration. She is so matter-of-fact, wry, and indomitable it's not hard to imagine she's a granddaughter of True Grit's Mattie Ross. Lewis' part of the story is less engaging, in part because its third-person narration lacks Cloris' winning voice. Lewis' work life is oddly more outlandish than Cloris' wilderness journey; so many wacky colleagues and eccentric locals jostle for space with the weird Bloor family that the Fargo-esque humor can seem strained. And Lewis' alcoholism is so prodigious that, after she's guzzled six or seven bottles of wine in one day, it's hard to credit her staying conscious, much less driving mountain roads. But both she and Cloris find paths to self-discovery, and eventually some will be saved. A captivating survival story alternates with a less satisfying look at a midlife crisis in this promising first novel.

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November 15, 2019
Sole survivor of a 1986 plane crash in Montana's remote Bitterroot National Forest, 72-year-old Cloris Waldrip is an, all things considered, extraordinarily sunny narrator for Curtis' deep and surprising debut. The polite, spiritual, and quietly hilarious Texan tells her story (from the safety of a Vermont assisted-living facility), alternating with chapters that follow Bitterroot ranger Lewis and her goofy but capable band's rescue search. Cloris' survival narration is exciting, with devastating vistas and a mysterious savior in the form of a possible fugitive, but her musings on her past life and life in general are some of the book's very best moments. "I have taken more than I can ever hope to give back, and just by going for a little ole walk outside I set new roads for the wind." Like its subject, Lewis' story is, well, rangier, and a worthy foil. Both women have their ticks?Cloris' committment to telling even the ugliest bits of her tale, Lewis' "secret" all-day Merlot-sipping habit?and both are wise enough to know what they don't know. Gloriously unexpected.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)