Into the Jungle

ERICA FERENCIK

Stats for my copy: egalley, Simon & Schuster, 2019.

How acquired: Received from the publisher via NetGalley for review.

My thoughts: I loved THE RIVER AT NIGHT, by this same author, so much that when I saw this on NetGalley I immediately requested it without even bothering to read the synopsis.

This book could be subtitled Everything You Never Thought You Wanted to Know About the Amazon Jungle. Talk about harsh living. I can't imagine I would last even a week in the conditions that Lily and Omar lived in.

Omar is a native Amazonian. Lily is an American who has recently aged out of the foster care system and is living in Bolivia, working in a hostel for room and board with two other young girls. She has a meet cute with Omar one night and falls in love. When tragedy strikes the small village of Ayachero, where Omar is from, Lily travels home with him. She's not particularly welcomed by most of the villagers. Omar's mother in particular does not care for her at all.

From there we get an eye-opening look at daily life in the jungle, where a majority of a person's time is spent just surviving. The descriptions of the jungle and the myriad plants and creatures found there are evocative. Lily is an incredibly strong protagonist. Growing up in the foster care system hardened her, but Omar gets past all her defenses and sweeps her into a quick moving romance. You know it had to be true love if she's happy making a home in a remote village where the heat can be oppressive and the work is never ending. 

I very much liked both Lily and Omar. Told in first person POV, we get to know Lily very well. It's a great character study, with plenty of action thrown in. The secondary characters, seen through Lily's eyes, are also well written, from villagers to missionaries to evil poachers to an amusing river pilot named For God's Sake. They are all quite vivid.

And then along with all the hardships to overcome there's heart breaking tragedy. I can't imagine wanting to ever visit the Amazon, but I am quite interested in reading more about life there. I look forward to whatever Ms. Ferencik comes up with next!

Goodreads synopsis: Lily Bushwold thought she’d found the antidote to endless foster care and group homes: a teaching job in Cochabamba, Bolivia. As soon as she could steal enough cash for the plane, she was on it.

When the gig falls through and Lily stays in Bolivia, she finds bonding with other broke, rudderless girls at the local hostel isn’t the life she wants either. Tired of hustling and already world-weary, crazy love finds her in the form she least expected: Omar, a savvy, handsome local man who’d abandoned his life as a hunter in Ayachero—a remote jungle village—to try his hand at city life.

When Omar learns that a jaguar has killed his four-year-old nephew in Ayachero, he gives Lily a choice: Stay alone in the unforgiving city, or travel to the last in a string of ever-more-isolated river towns in the jungles of Bolivia. Thirty-foot anaconda? Puppy-sized spiders? Vengeful shamans with unspeakable powers? Love-struck Lily is oblivious. She follows Omar to this ruthless new world of lawless poachers, bullheaded missionaries, and desperate indigenous tribes driven to the brink of extinction. To survive, Lily must navigate the jungle--its wonders as well as its terrors—using only her wits and resilience.