49 pages • 1 hour read
Shea ErnshawA History Of Wild Places
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Barn”
Part 1, Interlude 1 Summary: “Foxes and Museums: Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail Series”
Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to death by suicide.
Diegetic excerpts from book one of Maggie St. James’s Eloise and the Foxtail series are interspersed throughout the narrative. A young girl, Eloise, sees a “riddle fox.” She wonders whether it’s real or a dream but realizes that both dreams and nightmares are rare.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Travis Wren has the ability to see people’s final moments when he is around objects and places related to them. He stops at a gas and grocery store that is “paralyzed in time” and asks the woman behind the counter if she has heard of Maggie St. James (6). Maggie is the author of a popular children’s book series about a character who finds an underground museum, and a young reader notoriously died after trying to dig deep into the ground to mimic this.
The shopkeeper tells him everyone in the area has and complains about the spectacle the woman’s disappearance instigated. The narrator asks if Maggie passed through town, and she tells him that Maggie asked about a red barn nearby, so she told her about the uninhabited Kettering place. Maggie’s car was found abandoned the next morning.
Travis goes to the barn and holds an old charm—a book—that Maggie wore on a necklace. While he thinks it may be proof that a struggle occurred, he feels her memories and realizes that the charm came free of the necklace on its own. Maggie intended to be in this place rather than arriving as a result of her car breaking down. He remembers a month earlier when he was called about the case by Ben, his old college roommate who is now a detective. Though he initially declined, Ben convinced him to meet Maggie’s parents.
Back in the woods, Travis realizes that Maggie had not gone to the Alexander house near the barn, as the police believed, but deeper into the woods. He sees “three straight gashes [. . .] cut vertically into the bark” of a tree (24), which he thinks are a warning.
After reminiscing about his childhood experience regarding his supersensory ability, Travis follows the “after-image” of Maggie deeper into the woods (27). When he thinks he has lost it, he sees the same marking of three gashes on another tree and follows that instead. His truck gets stuck in the snow, and he decides to continue on foot.
Travis remembers his sister, Ruth. She was troubled and disappeared on more than one occasion, so he waited a month after her last disappearance to look for her. He is consumed with guilt because he found her a few hours too late, after she had died by suicide. He thinks that finding Maggie could be a kind of redemption.
Travis recalls meeting Maggie’s parents. While Mr. St. James was warm and desperate for news of his daughter, Mrs. St. James was more reticent. She insinuated that Maggie may not want to be found, and when Travis asked for more details, she only said, “Pastoral.” Travis remembers searching for clues on the internet, where he found a newspaper article about a commune buying land to start an off-grid community called Pastoral.
In the woods, Travis finds a guard post and a sign for Pastoral.
Part 1 Analysis
In the first part of the novel, Ernshaw simultaneously characterizes Travis’s supernatural ability and establishes memory as a key narrative thread. Early in the text, Travis thinks about the idea that “we all leave markers behind—dead or alive—vibrations that trail behind us through all the places we’ve been” (14). This passage describes how Travis can see others’ memories when he interacts with their objects or places they’ve been. Metaphorically, it introduces the idea that memory and identity are connected. Throughout the novel, the protagonists struggle to unearth their real memories to find out who they are. Travis’s ability is important, firstly because it provides the catalyst for the novel’s plot—Travis wouldn’t have been in a position to search for Maggie St. James without it—but secondly, it adds an element of magic to the novel’s genre. This creates an uncertainty that carries throughout the novel about what is and isn’t real.
Ernshaw blends several genres in A History of Wild Places—primarily mystery, thriller, and magical realism. Travis’s ability creates the novel’s magical realism because it is a supernatural ability that operates alongside an otherwise realistic narrative. This otherworldly plot device alludes to the possibility of magic in the world of the novel, so when the “rot” is introduced in Part 2, it is easier to believe that the illness may be real. The expectation of magic facilitates the twist later in the novel: The “rot” is not real, but a product of Levi’s brainwashing. Part 1 also introduces the novel’s mystery and thriller elements. Mystery and thriller tend to be differentiated by when a crime takes place: mystery before the novel begins and thriller during its plot. A History of Wild Places includes elements of both. Maggie has disappeared before the novel begins, but the risk of additional crimes increases throughout the novel. The thriller elements build as the narrative moves toward its climax and characters experience conflict, but in this section, the tension comes solely from the mystery Travis is attempting to solve.
Ernshaw establishes the novel’s dark, ominous tone in the first part of the novel through vivid descriptions of the setting as Travis moves toward Pastoral. The community’s location is described as “in the Three Rivers Mountains of northern California” (22). Importantly, this is the novel’s only reference to the actual geographical location of the community. As Travis progresses into the woods in the snow, the setting becomes increasingly unsettling due to details such as the marks in the trees. References to Ruth’s death by suicide, the death of one of Maggie’s young readers, and the mystery of Maggie’s disappearance all contribute to the overall tone.
