I love a good survival story, and Be Not Far from Me is a damn good survival story. A girl alone in the woods with nothing but her will and her wits to fend off any and all threats? Why yes, I do want to know everything about her. And fortunately, with Ashley Hawkins, there’s a lot to know. She’s a complex heroine for what starts out as a straightforward tale of a person lost in the wilderness, but which turns into a multilayered meditation on loss, poverty, and endurance.
It’s very much like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King, although without the supernatural entity shadowing the protagonist, and with an older and more skilled protagonist. There’s a gruesome central thread of the plot that’s a lot more like 127 Hours, except it’s 360 hours and protagonist Ashley is moving as far and fast as she can instead of being trapped in a single place. But yes, mostly it’s an angry Gary Paulsen novel, Hatchet without the hatchet. Well. Mostly.
At one point Ashley does get her hands on a makeshift cutting/chopping instrument. It’s a scene so horrible and potent I almost missed my stop on the bus because I couldn’t look away, but that comes later. In the beginning, Ashley finds herself without any weapons or tools. She doesn’t even have a shirt: she had to use it to bind the wreckage of her foot, which she mangled in her rush from the campsite. Her journey begins barefoot in her sports bra, lost in more ways than one.
Her ordeal begins with a horrible discovery at a party in the woods. She’s drunk, she’s angry, and she’s a champion cross-country runner as well as a confident woodswoman, so her blind rush into the forest doesn’t seem all that bad an idea. But when she wakes up injured and hungover with no supplies and no idea where she is, her confidence sours. That’s when her tenacity takes over.
Ashley’s story is as much about her personal growth and resilience as it is about her woodcraft and survival skills. There are very clever moments at which she describes how she makes a cord out of her own hair, and how she fashions a sling for her foot, but this isn’t an instruction manual with some narrative embellishments. This is a story of Ashley’s survival, how her past both hinders and helps her, how her relationships sustain her, and how her own spirit gets her back up from every terrible fall.
I suspect people may get frustrated with Ashley for being stubborn and continuing to travel rather than staying in one place and trying to get attention. I am not an expert on wilderness survival and can’t comment on the relative wisdom of her choices, but as a former Angry Teenage Girl I can certainly attest that stubbornness to the point of masochism and self-reliance to the point of absurdity are certainly in keeping with Ashley’s age and situation. I, too, would have been the kind of person to press on despite all the disastrous setbacks. I wouldn’t have gotten as far as she did, certainly, but I would have gone.
Be Not Far from Me explores both the importance and the limits of self-reliance. She also delves into the poisonousness of pride but also the importance of anger. McGinnis always writes with raw, furious intensity, and I love her for it. Female anger, and especially teen female anger, is only recently a subject authors have been allowed to celebrate, and it’s long overdue.
If anything breaks the suspension of disbelief, it’s the repeated discoveries of the leavings of her personal hero and longtime crush Davey Beet. Davey set off into the wilderness several years ago and never returned. He’s presumed dead, and even Ashley knows that’s likely the case no matter how much she hopes otherwise.
Part of the issue is that the Appalachian wilderness is vast. It’s a cornerstone of the whole premise of the book: Ashley is lost in something so huge, so overwhelming, and so magnificently terrifying that her spirit will have to rise to the challenge. The hugeness of her personality and her resolve are being weighed against the oldest, most indifferent force humankind has ever dealt with: the wilderness from which we sprang.
So it undermines that theme rather a lot when Ashley finds signs of the one person she most wants to see. From a narrative standpoint, Ashley just needed some kind of emotional encounter to spur her inner growth and her resolve. And okay, sure, this is a novel, and also the world is full of strange coincidences, but McGinnis clearly wanted to tell the story of Ashley and Davey a little more than it made sense for that story to be told. The chances of finding—repeatedly!—signs of his passage are so infinitesimally small as to be impossible. And there’s not enough mysticism to really believe it’s part of some Larger Plan, nor enough madness to imply that it’s all just Ashley hallucinating.
This is not a religious book and Ashley is not a religious person. She’s pretty iffy on God, and she doesn’t go in for spiritual explanations. If McGinnis has opinions or beliefs, they’re hard to find. I’m glad this doesn’t conform to any stereotypical narratives about lost sheep or the magic to be found in the darkness. That would be trite, and this book is about as far from trite as Ashley is from civilisation.
The wilderness is brutal. Ashley at one point has to kill an opossum, and the scene is utterly wrenching as well as necessarily gory. Even if there’s some kind of faint providence in Ashley’s journey, it doesn’t rise to the level of implying that there’s any kind of benign or beautiful force at work: to be alone in the forest is to be locked in mortal struggle. Ashley’s struggle is tense, terrible, and engrossing.
Be Not Far From Me is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of March 3rd 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Hatchet meets Wild in this harrowing survival story from Edgar Award-winning author Mindy McGinnis.
The world is not tame.
Ashley knows this truth deep in her bones, more at home with trees overhead than a roof. So when she goes hiking in the Smokies with her friends for a night of partying, the falling dark and creaking trees are second nature to her. But people are not tame either. And when Ashley catches her boyfriend with another girl, drunken rage sends her running into the night, stopped only by a nasty fall into a ravine. Morning brings the realization that she’s alone – and far off trail. Lost in undisturbed forest and with nothing but the clothes on her back, Ashley must figure out how to survive despite the red streak of infection creeping up her leg.
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