Wild Dark Shore was not what I expected it to be at all. Often that’s a good thing, but this was torturous to get through. I should have known something was wrong when the back of the book had one blurb for Wild Dark Shore and seven others for McConaghy’s two other novels Once There Were Wolves and Migrations.
I truly wonder if Hannah Kent actually read through the book in its entirety, because it’s neither a gripping mystery nor is it a psychological thriller. It’s a romance which would be fine if the romance made any modicum of sense.
Our main character Rowan sets off to a small, incredibly isolated research island off the coast of Antarctica to find her husband Hank that she hasn’t seen or heard from in months after receiving multiple concerning messages from him.
Based on that description, she sounds like an incredibly devoted partner, right? Like she deeply cares about her husband and is incredibly concerned over his messages, right?
No.
Rowan despises and resents this man to her very core. She blames him for the wildfire that burned their house down. She constantly thinks about how she doesn’t really even love him that much. At one point she explains to another character that she thinks he’s a narcissist who manipulates other people for his own gain.
The best part of all of that is that her disdain for him is kept a secret from us until it’s relevant to the plot. At no point in the first half of the book is it ever even hinted that she hates her husband. In fact, descriptions of him are incredibly positive and paint him as a wonderful guy. Which is especially weird since most of Rowan’s perspective is told in first person. Really strange as a reader to have her randomly do a 180 on her feelings towards her husband unprompted. Just bad writing.
All of this raises the question: Why did she even come here in the first place if she hates him to the degree she does? Who knows? Certainly not the author, that’s for sure.
The romance in this book is completely nonsensical. Rowan shows up on this island to find out that all of the researchers have apparently just up and left according to the family left on the island– Dom and his three children. Rowan can tell they’re lying to her about something and she suspects they maybe could have killed them and chooses to also withhold information from them. Dom knows Rowan is lying and is skeptical about her to the point where he has either himself or one of his children escort Rowan anywhere on the island to keep an eye on her.
Despite being incredibly suspicious of one another they fall in love within about a week. All it took for him was seeing she knows how to use tools and all it took for Rowan was Dom existing I guess because he is pretty unlikable, especially at first. And you guessed it, they are still incredibly suspicious of one another even after “falling in love” because that’s what the plot demands.
The romance also begins before we get the 180 that Rowan doesn’t actually like her husband which feels weirdly disorienting. One minute she’s describing how deeply her husband cares for nature and her and how she desperately wants to know what happened to him and the next she’s got her tongue down another guy’s throat–a guy she thinks may have murdered people let me remind you.
There are two other “relationships” that both concern grooming that are handled completely differently. If I had a nickel for every time grooming happened, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
There’s a relationship between Dom’s son Raff who is 17-18 during the relationship and another researcher on the island name Alex. We’re never given Alex’s age, but he’s clearly finished college and possibly even grad school considering his position as a researcher on the island and is likely in his mid-to-late 20s. Raff, in contrast, is severely behind in school and can barely read.
We’re given a chapter from Alex’s perspective where he describes impatiently waiting until Raff’s 18th birthday to have sex with him:
Three extra months with Raff. And during these months Raff will turn eighteen and then maybe Alex will not feel so guilty for the things he imagines doing with him.
Gross.
This relationship is romanticized heavily for the entirety of the book. Alex hangs himself after his brother is killed in an accident which feels like it only happened so the author could get rid of everyone except the Salt family on the island. The spot where he did it is a recurring motif to really hammer home that theme of lost love and grief. Raff plays beautiful sad music for his sister to show his grief of losing his lover. He hides away and has outbursts of anger because he can’t deal with his grief. Raff laments that they never made their relationship official.
No one has concerns over the relationship except Alex’s brother Tom whose concern is more about them being gay than the age gap.
The other relationship is between Dom’s daughter Fen, 17, and Hank, mid-40s.
Hank has sex with Fen after he mentions her being legal which contradicts Alex’s thoughts about Raff earlier, but who needs consistency? Fen later goes to Hank to tell him she thinks she’s pregnant. Hank reacts to this by attempting to drown her. When Dom finds out about this he beats Hank to the point of near death.
Why is the inappropriateness of these relationships not treated the same? Why doesn’t Dom react this way or at all about Raff and Alex who have openly been in a relationship since Raff was also 17? Would Dom have even cared at all had it not been for Hank trying to kill Fen? It’s not commentary on anything since Raff and Alex’s relationship is romanticized. Just feels weird.
This book has very strange commentary around having children. Rowan doesn’t want them but when psychoanalyzed by her love interest we find out this only stems from trauma and not any actual desire to not have kids. Because of course all women want babies deep down, right? You’re just too scared to have them silly woman. Here, let me, a man, whose chapters are riddled with thoughts of wanting to replace my dead wife with you to take care of my children explain that to you.
Women’s roles in this book are also odd. Two separate women sacrifice themself to save the same child and it’s presented in this bizarre almost saintly way. Like women are supposed to sacrifice themselves for children even if that child isn’t their own and if they don’t do this, they get cancer.
Rowan hates her mother because she “let” her younger brother drown in a horrific accident when she was younger. As punishment for this misdeed, the universe bestows cancer upon her mother. Before her mother dies, Rowan asks her this:
Why did you have kids if you weren’t going to bother keeping them safe?
This was especially odd to me when only a few lines later, when thinking about her father, she only has this as a thought:
His means of survival was to get away, get as far away as possible and pretend none of it, and none of us, ever existed. To be honest, I understand that.
So, for Rowan’s entire life, her mother is to blame for not keeping her children safe, but her father who was also there, gets none of the blame or resentment and is excused for leaving. Interesting. That’s the only time her dad is ever brought up. I assumed he was dead which is why the blame was solely placed on her mother. Nope. Her mom just didn’t do her motherly duties.
Normally, I wouldn’t read so heavily into something like this. But when there is such a heavy theme of women saving children and being venerated for it throughout the book, I can’t help but think that this was the message whether intentional or not. That the best thing a woman can do is die in pregnancy for a child or sacrifice herself for one. And a woman not doing these things is punishable.
The author has two children of her own and the dedication at the beginning is clearly for them. I understand that she was probably aiming to write a story about motherhood but do it in a way that doesn’t strip every female character down to only her value as a mother and caregiver.
Wild Dark Shore was absolute misery to read. This is the least I’ve enjoyed a book in a very long time. Everything about this from the characters to the themes was awful. If this book has no haters, I’m dead.
