Blood Highway by Gina Wohlsdorf
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book is…a lot.
if you’re not sure whether that is a positive or negative assessment, join the club, because i’m not sure, either, but i am sure that the statement is 100% factual.
i was so excited when i first heard about this. wohlsdorf’s debut, Security, was a helluva fun book—great premise, great twists, great atmosphere, great energy. it was like nothing i had ever read before, and i have read many books.
this one is called BLOOD HIGHWAY, which is a title invoking headbanging adrenaline and splatter for all, and the synopsis is all kinds of my bread and butter:
A gripping, surprising, and sexy thriller with a big, pounding heart, Blood Highway takes a seventeen-year-old girl on a brutal journey into adulthood on a road trip that threatens to kill her before she reaches the end.
Rainy Cain, a tough, troubled high school senior, desperately wants to escape the confines of her life in Minneapolis. When her increasingly unstable mother suddenly commits suicide, Rainy thinks she has found her chance. Instead, her father, Sam—who she had always believed died before she was born—escapes from prison and abducts her, taking her on a cross-country trek in pursuit of millions of dollars that he believes her mother had kept from a botched robbery years earlier. On their heels the whole way is a young Minneapolis detective intent on bringing Rainy safely home. It is an odyssey that will test Rainy’s considerable instincts about sanity and madness, and keep readers turning pages till the twisty end.
and it’s not that the synopsis is lying, but it’s certainly tilting the book a bit so you’re seeing more of its back end. i mean, i read phrases like “a brutal journey into adulthood” and “a road trip that threatens to kill her” and i’m expecting a story whose resting state is “intense” and builds from there, but that is not the case here at all.
the “abduction” slash road trip doesn’t occur until nearly 150 pages in, just under the halfway mark, and the novel is frontloaded with a slow and emotionally complex unrolling of dramatic layers; mothers and suicide and grief, which is a shitty combo for me on my best day, worse when i’m all juiced up for a dark crime action thriller.
i knew that her mother’s suicide was going to be an element of the story, obviously, but i thought it would happen early on, maybe even offscreen, and i figured it would just be the event that set the daddy-daughter road trip/crime spree in motion, with the bulk of the book arcing à la She Rides Shotgun/Blackbird/The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley.
i was completely unprepared for how deeply this would dwell on the suicide’s aftermath, focusing on guilt and grief and mental illness and emotional abuse. i actually stopped reading (twice) to double-check the synopsis to make sure i hadn’t imagined that there was going to be a BLOOD HIGHWAY in my future. even rainy seems caught off-guard by how much space is given over unto unpacking her emotional baggage:
You say to yourself, “She’ll do it, and then it will be over.” But then she does it, and the fallout keeps falling.
there’s a lot of slow gloom before we get to the action.
and then it’s one unpredictable story arc after another. nothing about this is a black-and-white thriller; every situation grates just slightly against expectation. all of the relationships in this book seem slightly distorted, edging close to uncomfortable.
rainy is a slippery one—she’s become a teenage con artist out of necessity, but her persona swings from tough n’ jaded to vulnerable n’ naive at the drop of a hat, and while i like her best when she’s got her swagger on, her insights are frequently too psychologically cumbersome to be coming out of a teenage girl’s brain:
Don’t look back, they say. What you survive stays behind you, forget it, move on. But that never works. Pretending it does just keeps the damage sitting on your shoulder, until inevitably, you become your damage. It’s the type of realization you want to pass on to somebody. It’s the type of realization you get when all your somebodies are bodies.
still, there’s something appealing about the cinematic melodrama of that last line, and it highlights this performative quality she’s got to her, which rings true of a teenage girl still test-driving her persona:
”Look,” Blaine said. “People are mostly doing the best they can— “
“Don’t do that. Don’t platitude me. People are mostly doing the best they’re willing to do, not the best they can. A person’s actual best is pretty damn good, but it’s a lot of work. So most people find the maximum amount of work they’re willing to do and then they call that their best.” It came out in a rush. I’d never had that particular thought before. I loved it instantly, its mercilessness.
i appreciate the ways in which this book refuses to play nice with type or genre. everything requires a qualification, like how it’s not technically an abduction because rainy goes along willingly, and her father gives her plenty of freedom, even allowing her to call her new cop friend from the road more than once, and although he’s been advertised as a stone-cold criminal, for most of the trip, he’s quite an affable gent.
which is one way of looking at it—affable might just be the giving of zero fucks until fucks need to be given. no need to exert one’s will until the stakes demand it, after all.
Perhaps it was possible to be too at-home in the world. To see it as a show that’s just for you. Then there’s no ethics, no core. There’s only what you want.
there’s also a romance plot shoehorned into this that puts the “ick” in problematic(k).
”You were the best thing about the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
i was not on board with that development—i thought it was unnecessary and a bit more self-destructive than i would have expected from a character who’d already proven her knack for survival.
eventually, though, blood highway is for real. adrenaline is released. heads are banged. splatter occurs.
all in all, a scattery distribution of highs and lows.
although it shattered the enjoyment-expectations i’d formed by my love of her first novel and the narrative-expectations i’d formed by this book’s synopsis, i liked more of it than i didn’t like, and i’m keen to hear reactions from other readers on this one.
”How much slack do you have to cut yourself before you become a monster?”
3.5 stars cats rounded up.
