Wildlife sanctuaries must be in the zeitgeist in fiction this year, as Carly Hillman’s debut novel The Refuge is the second book taking place in a protected animal habitat I’ve read this summer. While Natalie Moss’s The Night Hunter (reviewed here) takes place in South Africa and Hillman’s book in Montana, both books share the theme that humans are the biggest danger of all.
Thirty-five years ago, seven-year-old Maeve was found in the wildlife refuge where Johnny Hayward worked and, still grieving the death of his own daughter and wife, Johnny went along with the girl’s lie that he was her father. Now Maeve has an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own, and Ava has no idea of the secrets her mother and “grandfather” are hiding. When a chance comment from a new co-worker makes Ava realize how isolated she is, she goes searching for the past Maeve has hidden from her… and opens a can of worms she never saw coming.
The Refuge is pitched as and blurbed as a thriller, but the structure and voices felt more like women’s fiction to me. After a few chapters in Ava’s (third-person) point of view, the book returns to the past and to Maeve’s mother, Evelyn. Rather than Ava learning on her own what exactly happened to her mother, the reader discovers it through Evelyn’s point-of-view in the past. The prose is strong; Evelyn’s story is gripping, and the character work is good, but it wasn’t the investigation by Ava that I expected when reading the blurb.
Ava wants to know why her mother refuses to leave the refuge. As Evelyn’s story evolves, she becomes trapped in her own kind of refuge, and the two separate stories become interesting negative mirrors of each other. The missing character is Maeve, who is the linchpin but doesn’t get her own point-of-view. Since she’s only seven when the story begins, it isn’t clear how much she might even remember or know about her own history, anyway.
The climax was riveting, but it felt like it came out of nowhere, introducing a poaching element that is never referenced earlier in the book.
The Refuge is well-written and entertaining, but it’s not the structured suspense thriller that I expected from its publisher, Crooked Lane Books. Fans of women’s fiction or historical fiction who want a little danger for the characters might find The Refuge a good place to start.
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