Get Started On Breaking Wild Formulated By Diane Les Becquets Compiled As Printable Format

won this book in a goodreads giveaway I had never heard of this writer, she will be on my reading list in the future.
By his book promised suspense and it more than delivered, I could not read fast enough to find out the next piece of information about the two female lead characters, She would alternate the chapters to tell the story about the two female leads, Each Amy and Pru had traumatic events that occurred early in their lives, Each event was very different yet you could see the simalarities between the two, I did not want the book to end even though you know it is going to end and you are very unsure of how it will end and how the two lead characters will intersect and will both of them be alive when they intersect.
I can't recommend this book highly enough, Run to get the book, Exceptional. Read on so I can tell you why,
The Hook I couldnt resist Berkleys prepublishing description or my GR friend Patty's review of this title,

The Line While other girls turned sweet sixteen, she learned how to fielddress a deer, ”

The Sinker

Epigram
We can never break free from the dark and degrading past.

Let us see life again, nevertheless, in the words of Isaac Babel
as a meadow over which women and horses wander.

MAXINE KUMIN, “Women and Horses”

I rarely read a book that I cant put down but I knew in this case, I had to in order to savor the experience.
So put it down I did, reading it over several days, allowing time to contemplate, stretching out the suspense and sheer beauty of this survival story.


Breaking Wild reads like a memoir, purposely so as described by author Diane Les Becquets, In an interview on sitelinkNPR she explains that there could be a memoir in her, but at this time she prefers to write autobiographical fiction which

”frees me up because I care so deeply for the people in my life not to have to inflict any hurt or shame on anyone else.
”

Id read her memoir in a minute yet I respect her wishes to keep her experiences of pain and sorrow hers and hers alone until if and when she wants to share them.


March is celebrated as Womens History Month and many books will be recommended that feature strong women, Breaking Wild features not one strong woman, but two and deserves to be added to that list,

Amy Raye is on a hunting trip for elk with two male companions, Raye, a bow hunter, has yet to get her tag and sets off alone to remedy this, She wounds a male elk and must track him to make the kill, Somehow she becomes horribly lost in the Colorado wilderness, in snow pack conditions and freezing cold,

Prue Hathaway and her rescue dog Kona set out to find the missing Raye, This is no easy task and after several days of horrific weather, Raye is feared dead, What is initially a rescue mission soon becomes one of search and recovery,

Over several weeks we are privy to Amy Rayes and Prue Hathaways thoughts and feelings as the story unfolds in alternating chapters and we learn the backstory of their lives.
There is a profound feeling of unity as one woman hopes for rescue and the other tries not to give up that hope.


Diane Les Becquets portrays two determined, brave, courageous women in this, her debut, into adult fiction, Amy and Prue are so real my emotions were raw throughout,

This might not be the book for those of you who are against hunting of animals for any reason, For the rest of you let me assure you that Les Becquets shows a deep respect for the elk her character hunts and the gift this flesh provides.
She details the hunt, perhaps more than some may tolerate, In addition her lush descriptions of nature and the wilderness made Breaking Wild an adventuresome read for me,

I have purchased a copy of sitelinkBreaking Wild and will be donating it to my public library, I predict it will be a word of mouth hit with readers,
Decisions.

We all make them every second of the day, But do we honestly weigh the impact upon those we love Like the pebble thrown carelessly into the pond, . the concentric circles seem to go on forever,

Amy Ray Latour ventures out on an elk hunt during the last weekend of the season with two male hunting companions.
Colorado wilds are just the place for an avid bow hunter and Amy is not going to lose a second of opportunity.
In the wee hours of the morning, Amy takes out on her own well before her hunting buddies have even stirred, Her quick decisions and preparations may come back to haunt her,

When Amy fails to show up at the camp site, Pru Hathaway and her dog are called in for the search.
Pru is an archaeological law enforcement ranger who is certified in search and rescue operations with her welltrained dog, Kona, The hunt for Amy begins and every resource is being employed,

Now hear me out: This is not just a "hunters only" kind of read, You will come to know the backstory on both Amy and Pru, Two completely different women with two completely different lifestyles, But it's back to those decisions once again, It's the impact of the road not taken, or perhaps, the impact of the actual road tread upon in life, What unravels in the telling of this tale will hold you steady and engaged, but it will also find you breathing harder and shaking your head in frustration at times.
It's all on the giving/receiving side of life, Yes, those decisions.

In truth, I found myself exasperated with Amy at times as a fellow hiker and outdoors person, Choices, once again, went out the window with both women, And yet, the writing is superb, Les Becquets infuses the storyline with her knowledge and her research, The words flow with emotions and the heavy human element visits us time and time again, Zip through technical jargon if you must, but don't lose what is at the core here, . . painful human transgressions.

I was locked into this book, I walked both sides of the street in loving and disliking the main characters all at the same time, Now that is the key feature of a very talented author, Keep me engaged in the story and send my emotional scale registering highs and lows, You sold me, Diane Les Becquets, I am so awaiting your next offering, This book was unbelievably gripping, Set in the Colorado Wilderness where most people would be unable to survive, we follow two women who have spent their lives surviving in the wild.
One is a hunter who loses her way, The other in the search and rescue expert trying to save her, Along the way, we learn about their histories and where their similarities end,

I finished this book in a single airplane ride,,hours. Right now I'm exploring books for our next round of picks for my mystery book club, This one started strong but ultimately won't make the cut, I was all set to recommend it for the first half of the book, but then things took a turn for the worse.


The jacket copy on the book is somewhat misleading, You go into the book thinking that it's all about a search and rescue, a first responder that just won't give up on a missing hunter.
Plus the two main characters in the book are female, something quite unusual in a book about hunting and wilderness survival, And the book certainly gets off to a strong start, Amy Raye, the hunter, goes off to try to bag an elk with a bow by herself, away from the rest of her party.
From the beginning, you can tell that there's a lot more going on than a simple hunting trip, You'll immediately want to know more about Amy Raye, why she's on this trip with friends instead of her husband, what's driving her to take off alone.


Next, we meet Pru, a Park Service employee specializing in archaeological protection of native artifacts and grounds on park lands.
She also owns a search and rescue trained dog, I've never read about a character exactly like this, and was also immediately interested,

Tension builds quickly, Amy Raye goes missing, a bad snow storm is blowing in, and search conditions are degenerating quickly, The book takes place in the Colorado Rockies, close to where I live, and the terrain and feel of the setting are really authentic.


The book alternates chapters between Amy Raye and Pru, First we read more about Amy Raye's hunt, the details of how she prepares, what she takes with her as she heads into the back country, and her thought process as she goes after her elk.
Next, we skip ahead a bit in time into Pru's POV, quartering treacherous mountain territory and trying to piece together where Amy Raye went with very few clues.


The first half of the book easily held my interest, And then it took a turn for the boring, Any Raye is stuck high in the mountains, and her story line becomes quite slow as she remains in place, thinking about her past.
This is the way we get her back story, and that back story is most of the second half of the book.
While her past is intriguing, it makes the forward motion of the plot grind to a halt,

The other problem is that Amy Raye's story quite frankly takes a turn into the unbelievable, While the detail about wilderness orientation and survival is good in the early part of the book, the last half asks you to believe that Amy Ray survives, with a badly broken leg, for several months in the back country during a Colorado mountain winter with only the gear she brought with her and a quarter of the elk that she killed to live on along with some juniper berries and pinon nuts.
While the author goes into some calculations about how many calories are in a pound of meat lean vs, fatty, she doesn't take into account Amy Ray's injury and the cold, both of which will sap a lot of energy, We're asked to believe that she survives for months on perhapscalories a day, The author takes pains to say that she has muscle spasms from lack of salt, but what about the loose teeth and slower bone healing because of no vitamins What about the fact that the elk quarter she lives off for months is refrigerated only by the wintry mountain air Why does she wait for several months before even trying to hike out Yes, I know that a broken bone would make it very difficult.
But I'll tell you what's even more difficult: trying to hike out on an unset badly healed broken bone after months of malnutrition.
The author seems to have some knowledge, but also some big blind spots about what's possible, If she was writing a more literary tale, maybe just maybe I could allow for some license, But because she has been so detailed in back country preparedness, hunter gear, search party protocol, I can't easily accept such glaring issues.


The other problem I have is more because of the jacket copy again, It says that Pru just won't give up looking for Amy Raye, but she totally does! The search is called off after only a couple of days due to the weather conditions, and everybody is convinced that Amy Raye is dead.
Pru does do a bit

of investigation into where Amy Raye's elk kill could have been made, but she's trying to find out what happened for body recovery purposes and to help the family find some closure, not because she ever thinks that Amy Raye is still alive.


And the story ends in the clunkiest deus ex machina way I've seen in a while, Although Amy Raye holes up in a cave with pictographs, this never links up with Pru's archaeological purview in any way, so that interesting choice of expertise never pays off in the story line.


The book is well written, The language is spare yet descriptive, These are women that don't use unnecessary words, who need solitude in the great outdoors instead of people, Their emotions come through strongly, and I was interested in them although I wasn't especially fond of Amy Raye, more for her poor choices in the wilderness than her sexual issues.
But I'm not sure that the author knew exactly where she wanted to go with this book, Did she want it to be an Anna Pigeon style park ranger mystery series focused on woman, vs nature Did she want it to be a Jack London style literary use of the wilderness to explore themes of loneliness and loss Did she want it to be detailoriented or allegorical If she really wanted a mystery, then probably using two viewpoints spoiled that, because all along we the readers are getting information about Amy Raye that Pru has no way of knowing.
This extra knowledge defuses the suspense, While the first half of the book built strongly, it lost its way after the set up and totally failed to stick the landing.
First half a, second half maybe a, That said, I would be willing to try the author again to see if she can nail the ending after having some practice.
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