{Been a while. There are other books I need to catch up on, but wanted to drop this fairly quickly after I read it.}
Obviously, I love me some Peter Heller. The Painter was the first Reading Well ever, way back in 2015; I also wrote about The River, The Last Ranger, and most recently, Celine. But my favorite novel by him was The Dog Stars (in a weird aside, this is not at all how I envisioned that book being adopted–I resonated more with the human side and, of course, Jasper, the dog, but here we are).
Until I read 2025’s The Orchard.
In my review of Celine, I was struck by Heller’s shift away from a novel centered on an interrogation of a certain kind of rugged masculinity. The Orchard continues that change: this is a novel with three main characters, all female (mother/daughter/friend).
Heller’s skill with writing about nature is on full display, here the forests of rural Massachusetts and Vermont, but the heart of the book is the characters, their relationships, and the slow, tragic slide that is both clearly signaled and never over-promised. The book is heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Perhaps most impressively, without ever drawing undue attention to it, The Orchard remains faithful to the point of view of the protagonist–at first as a young child, then, intermittently, as a young adult. There are things she never knows, things she never considers, things she only infers from her mother’s behavior, things she never thinks of questioning because she’s known no other possibilities. She does, of course, grow up, and her insight when older moves closer to some of these things, but never with omniscience, or recrimination.
Doing that without over romanticizing the character is quite a challenge, and one Heller meets head on.
It’s a quiet book–everything else Heller has written has gunshots, forest fires, a global apocalypse. You know, peril. Yet the stakes in The Orchard feel just as critical: the characters matter that much.
Highly recommended.