🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 3.5/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The Simple Wild yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
My review of this one is going to be a little different because this book made me feel a lot, and not always in the ways a book is supposed to. There was a lot that genuinely got to me. There was also a lot that frustrated me. Both of those things are true at the same time.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Beginning
I was really confused at the beginning because the book actually starts with Calla’s mom. She loved Wren deeply, but he was addicted to Alaska in a way that left her isolated, lonely, and spending her days under vitamin D lights just trying to cope. She eventually left when Calla was two, taking her to Toronto. Calla often called her dad growing up, but the conversations were one-sided, and he never once came to visit. Eventually when he missed yet another event she gave up. Twelve years of almost no contact followed. Now Calla is twenty-six, still living at home with her mom and stepfather Simon, and has built an entire life without her dad in it.
Simon deserves a mention here because he is genuinely one of the best characters in this book. He knows his wife still loves Wren. He has always known. He told Calla that if Wren ever moved to Toronto, his wife would probably leave him. And he loves her anyway. He is steady, grounded, and treats Calla like a daughter without ever making it feel forced. He is a genuinely good stepfather and you can tell he is her voice of reason. He is who she runs to when she is upset or struggling.
One night she gets a call from Alaska. It’s not Wren — it’s his friend Agnes, letting Calla know that Wren has lung cancer and that she should probably come. On the same night Calla catches her boyfriend hitting on another woman at a club and feels almost nothing about it. She decides she’s going to Alaska. She breaks up with the boyfriend because she genuinely just doesn’t care enough to be upset. Then she gets on a plane.
Arriving in Alaska
Wren isn’t there to pick her up. Jonas is. He is immediately rude to her for reasons she doesn’t understand — neither do I. He then flies her in the smallest plane available when larger options exist, and forces her to leave most of her luggage behind because of space. When they arrive, Wren still isn’t there. There’s no food in the fridge, no sign of effort, nothing. He shows up eventually, talks to her for about two and a half seconds, and goes to bed.
I cannot fully express how much that scene got to me. She took four flights to get to her father. A man she has never met in person — at least not since she was two — and he couldn’t stay awake long enough to have a real conversation with her. The book does an excellent job of sitting in that devastation without trying to rush past it.
The next morning he’s gone before she wakes up. He leaves her his truck and some money for groceries. But she doesn’t have a driver’s license, and he obviously doesn’t know her well enough to know this. She has never learned to drive. And of course she doesn’t know where anything is. This is a man who knows nothing about his own daughter’s life and has made zero effort to prepare for her arrival.
After calling Agnes, she is told to ask Jonas to take her to the store. He does it angrily and then basically tells her she’s self-centered for not knowing what’s going on in her dad’s life. He doesn’t know yet that Wren hasn’t tried to contact her in twelve years. He has a lot of preconceived opinions about Calla before she even arrived and none of them are particularly fair. He feels defensive over Wren — but take two seconds to think about why Wren knows nothing about her. Why Jonas has never even met Calla.
Wren
One of the things that disappointed me most about this book is that Wren is essentially a father figure to his entire community but not to his own daughter. He has built this whole life in Alaska, he is important to everyone around him, and yet somehow Calla has spent twenty-six years feeling like she didn’t matter to him. And a lot of his choices back that up. There was a medical emergency with Agnes’s daughter that kept him from flying to Toronto for an important event in Calla’s life, and instead of explaining that, he just let her believe the business came first. He kept making himself look worse through bad communication when the truth would have been completely understandable. Wren was a serious disappointment, and I felt the ending forgiveness would have never been given if he didn’t die.
Jonas eventually tells Wren straight to his face that he has handled all of this incredibly poorly. Wren starts to actually sit down with Calla and talk. Both of them start to see things from the other’s perspective. It is an emotional stretch of the book and if you have ever felt like you didn’t matter to a parent, it will hit you in a very specific way that’s hard to describe.
And then it comes out that everyone has been lying to Calla. Wren is not starting chemo next week. Wren has decided he is dying and he is going to let it happen. He doesn’t want to go through treatment. Jonas pushes him to tell her the truth. He does. He dies relatively soon after.
Jonas
Here is where I struggled.
Jonas hid Calla’s luggage when it arrived — the day after she did — because he “wanted to see what she was made of.” What?? He calls her Barbie. He was consistently rude and dismissive from the moment she got there. After she finds her hidden suitcases on his deck, she cuts his hair and trims his beard as retaliation. His response is to steal all of her makeup and skincare and hold it hostage. He is the one who was wrong here. He has no grounds for retaliation. And then they make out.
He goes from calling her Barbie and hiding all her stuff to telling her she’s smart, witty, and beautiful in the same conversation. There is no real accountability moment. No genuine I was wrong and I’m sorry. His explanation is essentially that he had preconceived notions about her before she arrived and wanted to test her. That is not an apology. And she jumps him anyway.
I don’t have a problem with enemies-to-lovers when the tension is built on something real. This felt like a man who treated her badly with no real reckoning, and then the book just decided they were in love.
The Ending
Calla goes back to Toronto after Wren dies. Jonas stops texting. She assumes it’s over. Then one night, over a month later, he shows up on her front steps at one in the morning to tell her he is quitting his job because Wren sold the company and he wants her to move to Bangor with him so he can start his own charter service.
He says if she’s not happy they’ll figure it out. He says as long as he’s flying and she’s with him, he’s happy.
Except earlier in this same book he said he has zero intention of ever leaving Alaska. So if Calla is unhappy in Alaska, what happens? We watched her mom be miserable in Alaska. We watched that relationship fall apart for exactly this reason. The book ends on what’s supposed to be a romantic note and I couldn’t shake the feeling that we are watching the beginning of the same cycle.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥 — There’s a little heat — not described in depth — but the buildup to it is where the book loses me.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Disappointed. Not because of the ending itself, but because of the pattern it implies. Her mom was miserable in Alaska. Her dad refused to leave. Jonas refusing to leave Alaska while Calla has a whole life in Toronto feels like the setup for a repeat of everything that just broke her heart about her parents’ relationship. I do understand the trip to Alaska changed her, but I genuinely don’t believe it changed her to the extent where she would be happy leaving all her friends and family for a small town existence in Alaska where she doesn’t know anyone.
Would I Reread It?
No.
The Hot Take
Wren is not as good a person as this book wants you to believe he is. He was a dad to everyone in his community and a stranger to his own daughter. His communication failures weren’t just quirks of personality. They had real consequences that Calla lived with for over two decades. And Jonas stealing her luggage and then retaliating when she called him on it is not slow burn romance. It is a man behaving badly with no real accountability.
Where to Get
📖 Physical Book
Amazon | Bookshop.org
📱 Ebook
Amazon
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