Wildland: A Novel

I received a free electronic copy of this debut novel from Netgalley, Rebecca Hodge, and Crooked Lane Books. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this deeply moving novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. I am happy to recommend Rebecca Hodge to friends and family. She writes from the heart about important milestones in life. Those curves in the road that measure our spiritual worth by our response. Kat Jamison is in her late-40's, an Alexandria high school teacher, mother of a single adult daughter who is a vet and works with and trains dogs. Kat was widowed a couple of years ago, and a breast cancer survivor. This time despite the radical mastectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy in the past her cancer is back, and advanced. Kat nursed her own mother through to the end with breast cancer. She remembers the pain of body and soul, the emotional energy she had to find to see her mother in such pain, the bleakness of each day structured around medication and nausea and sick room duty. The months of watching her mother waste away, fade away. And while she wouldn't take back a day of that time with her own mom, she wouldn't want to put her daughter through that experience. She is toying with the idea of taking those good days left to her and spending them making different, joyous memories with her daughter. But Sara is doing her best to guilt Kat into fighting off the dreaded C. Again. Kat assures Sara she will consider her viewpoint, but she has booked a month at a vacation house on a mountainside where she and her husband Jim once stayed. Good memories there, clean clear air, views to break your heart with their beauty. At the end of this 'vacation', she will have decided one way of the other. There is, of course, no landline phone, nor cell phone coverage. The road is primitive, a two-track badly rutted, but she promises to call Sara when she goes into town to shop. She had packed up four boxes of memorabilia, filling the whole back seat of her car, touchstone memories that she has saved over her adult lifetime - her daughter's schoolwork, souvenirs, and college work, play programs from the classes Kat has taught over the years, important photos and paperwork from their lives and those of her parents - all things Sara will one day want. Hopefully to pass on to her children... Kat will use this month to sort and preserve this life story into a couple of albums that she can pass on to Sara. Her rented cabin is at the top of a pass, and the view is extraordinary with bench seats placed in the best viewing areas of the pass - and popular with the down-road vacationers. All those long hours of solitary, serene introspection she had pictured might not be. She is met on her arrival in the driveway of the cabin by daughter Sara, who insists that she keep a golden lab named Juni with her while she is on the mountain despite the fact that Kat has never had a dog, never wanted on. Sara's life revolves around dogs so she can't understand that mindset. They argue again about starting cancer treatments at the car as Sara gets ready to leave, headed for Florida to judge a regional agility competition. Within the hour, Juni has befriended Malcolm Lassiter, late 40s or early 50s, a security consultant at his firm in D.C.. Malcolm is ex-Special Forces military with a badly scarred face, and with him is his recently adopted son Nirav, a nine-year-old Pakistani orphan Malcolm encountered while working in Istanbul. Nirav has limited English and is a bit shy and has only been in the US for a few days. The Lassiters are staying in the cabin toward the bottom of the road while their new home purchase in D. C. is being finalized. Something that Malcolm says as they are leaving to walk back down the road to their cabin makes Kat aware that he overheard her argument with Sara as she was leaving. Kat hasn't shared her recent diagnosis with anyone but Sara as she doesn't want the side effects that go with that knowledge - the knowing looks and sympathy and unsolicited advice that c