I’ll admit the blurb pulled me into this one – a sixteen year-old girl waking up in the forest with no memory of what happened. She has a head injury and there doesn’t seem to be anyone around…except a police team who visit occasionally and seem terrible at solving things! What happened?!
The story follows 16 year-old Cass who does have memory loss following a head injury. However, her memories return slowly and we discover the history that led her to the remote forest – the haven of the title. Her family take a lead from a visitor to their house and embark on an effort to live off-grid as a way of helping the environment. They go to a mysterious settlement of like-minded people where they are very much treated as outsiders – and then it all gets very weird and dystopian!
I did find the book, although you have to be prepared to just go with some of the weirdness. In particular, I found that I had to suspend disbelief that Cass – in many ways so, so naive – turned into a kind of survival expert as she navigated the dangers of the deserted haven. At other times, I felt like she was really child-like, especially around her obsession with Mo – not that this is unrealistic, probably, for a teenager. She was an interesting character and I certainly felt compelled to keep reading.
I found the workings of the haven to be really interesting – I was worried that it would be presented really one-dimensionally as a bunch of crazy people with hippy ideas about saving the earth. However, there was a depth and authenticity to the community – they had genuinely noble intentions and were (with some notable exceptions) working together productively to keep the haven running. I thought this was an intriguing idea and an important environmental message, even if it doesn’t go well for this particular bunch!
It’s hard to describe more of the book without some serious spoilers, so I’ll just say that I found lots to enjoy in the book and I did race through it to get to the truth.
If thrillers are your thing, you’ll like this – there’s lots of tension, lots of characters with dubious motives and lots of intrigue. You’ll want to keep reading just to check that Cass is OK – or whether she has done really bad things.
Thanks to NetGalley for my review copy of the book. Opinions are entirely my own.
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Header photo by Dmytro Tolokonov on Unsplash
