Black Woods Blue Sky

Birdie’s keeping it together, of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes on her shifts, and has to bring her daughter Emaleen to work while she waits tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but it’s a tough town to be a single mother and Emaleen never goes hungry. Still, she remembers happier times-trout fishing with her grandfather and hiking in the tundra-being free in the world of nature. Arthur Neilsen is a soft-spoken recluse, with scars across his face, who brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods one day. He speaks with a strange cadence, appears in town only at the change of seasons, and most people avoid him. But for Birdie, he represents everything she’s ever longed for. He lives in a cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River and tells Birdie about the caribou, marmots and wild sheep that share his untamed world. She falls in love with him and the land he knows so well. Against the warnings of those who care about her, Birdie moves to his isolated cabin. She and her daughter are alone with Arthur in a vast wilderness, hundreds of miles from roads, telephones, electricity or outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. She can start a fire and cook on a woodstove. She has her rifle and fishing rod. In the beginning, it is an idyllic life-the three of them catch salmon, pick berries and swim in sunlit waters. But soon Birdie realizes that she is not at all prepared for what lies ahead: Arthur harbors a dark secret unlike anything she’d ever imagined; and she learns that the Alaska wilderness is as mysterious and dangerous as it is beautiful. Black Woods, Blue Sky is a suspenseful novel with life-and-death stakes about the love between a mother and daughter, and about the lure of a wild life-about what we gain and what it might cost us.