Books that leave you wanting more! Of the story, the characters, the setting, and more of the Authors writing. Kimi Cunningham Grant, you’ve just made it into my top books read this year! So far anyway… I don’t see many knocking this one off the pedestal to be honest.
My short review summary is that this is a compelling Father/Daughter storyline focusing on the genre of literary suspense. From start to finish it is humble, beautiful, challenging and hopeful. It’s about falling apart and then getting put back together, with the pieces all in different places. But learning to love where they have been put.
Without giving anything away, this a book that has a twist that I didn’t see coming at all. Characters that are shady and shifty, but hide little surprises. There are elements of an underlying romance, loyalties, secret pasts and making things work despite the odds being against you. Parts of the book will really challenge your own thinking, constantly asking you, ’What would you have done?’
The settings is also beautifully remote, chilling and will have you shivering even on the hottest day. I know this because I read it it in thirty degree heat in a swimming pool! It’s an evocative novel of suspense, and I can see why it was chosen as the Barnes and Noble monthly read. It will prompt a lot of book club discussions!
About the Book
A father and daughter living in the remote Appalachian mountains must reckon with the ghosts of their past in Kimi Cunningham Grant’s These Silent Woods, a mesmerizing novel of suspense.
No electricity, no family, no connection to the outside world.
For eight years, Cooper and his young daughter, Finch, have lived in isolation in a remote cabin in the northern Appalachian woods. And that’s exactly the way Cooper wants it, because he’s got a lot to hide. Finch has been raised on the books filling the cabin’s shelves and the beautiful but brutal code of life in the wilderness. But she’s starting to push back against the sheltered life Cooper has created for her―and he’s still haunted by the painful truth of what it took to get them there.
The only people who know they exist are a mysterious local hermit named Scotland, and Cooper’s old friend, Jake, who visits each winter to bring them food and supplies. But this year, Jake doesn’t show up, setting off an irreversible chain of events that reveals just how precarious their situation really is. Suddenly, the boundaries of their safe haven have blurred―and when a stranger wanders into their woods, Finch’s growing obsession with her could put them all in danger. After a shocking disappearance threatens to upend the only life Finch has ever known, Cooper is forced to decide whether to keep hiding―or finally face the sins of his past.
Vividly atmospheric and masterfully tense, These Silent Woods is a poignant story of survival, sacrifice, and how far a father will go when faced with losing it all.
About The Author
Kimi Cunningham Grant is the author of Fallen Mountains, Silver Like Dust, and These Silent Woods. Kimi is a two-time winner of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize in Poetry and a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship in creative nonfiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in Fathom, Literary Mama, RATTLE, Poet Lore, and Whitefish Review. She lives with her family in Pennsylvania.
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