The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend

The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend – 304 pages

ARC from Berkely Publishing and Netgalley for an honest review

Book Blurb:

The dangers of Alaska aren’t limited to storms, starvation, and grizzly bears. Sometimes the most dangerous thing is the person you love.
It’s summer in Alaska and the light surrounding the shipping-container-turned-storage shed where Liv Russo is being held prisoner is fuzzy and gray. Around her is thick forest and jagged mountains. In front of her, across a clearing, is a low-slung cabin with a single window that spills a wash of yellow light onto bare ground. Illuminated in that light is the father of her child, a man she once loved. A man who is now her jailor. Liv vows to do anything to escape.  
Carrying her own secrets and a fierce need to protect her young son, Liv must navigate a new world where extreme weather, starvation, and dangerous wildlife are not the only threats she faces. With winter’s arrival imminent, she knows she must reckon with her past and the choices that brought her to the unforgiving Alaskan landscape if she is ever going to make it out alive.

My Review: 3 stars

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The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend takes place in the rugged land of Alaska where our protagonist Liv is being held captive by her husband (Mark), that until recently she believed was dead.

This sounded like an interesting and exciting book to read and get totally lost in. I was definitely expecting a survival story, but this was giving off sister wives and free love cult vibes. Don’t get me wrong, parts of the book were well written and believable, however there were many parts or should I say too many parts that seemed far-fetched and non-believable. I wanted so much to like Liv but I thought many of her choices were made without considering the consequences.

I did enjoy the brotherhood that Xander and Rudy shared and that Rudy played a bigger part in the story than expected. Rudy’s mother, Angela, was another one of Mark’s wives and had a pretty predictable twist especially because she was a wackadoodle.

I’m not sure if the story itself bothered me or that the writing had so much more potential to make this a true survival story about living off the land in the brutal cold of Alaska.