“But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die,” (McConaghy 232).
Dominic Salt and his three children are the caretakers of a tiny island called Shearwater, home of the world’s largest seedbank. Once full of researchers, dangerous environmental events caused by climate change have left the Salts as the only ones left. That is until a storm brings a woman ashore. Rowan is fiercely independent, but injured after being shipwrecked on Shearwater she’ll have to trust the Salts to help her heal, even though she doesn’t trust them one bit. Rowan always meant to come to Shearwater, but she refuses to tell the Salts why, while the Salts are hiding secrets of their own.
Wild Dark Shore has been getting a lot of buzz lately. It’s a Heather’s Pick book, it’s getting rave reviews, but honestly I don’t know why. This is one of the most disappointing books I’ve ever read, and for that reason I’ll be spoiling some of the plot.
Alright, I lied, I can understand why people like this book, McConaghy is a fantastic writer. Her descriptions of Shearwater from the island itself to it’s inhabitants are so beautifully written, it’s hard for readers not to imagine themselves there. If anything it’s a shame that McConaghy is such a good writer, because the plot itself is so disappointing.
Marketed as a Mystery/Thriller, Wild Dark Shore is that in the simplest of ways. The mystery stems from the fact that Dominic and Rowan don’t trust each other, and because they don’t trust each other each refuses to actually tell the other why they are on Shearwater. A lot of the issues in this book would have been solved with some clear communication, but of course one could argue there wouldn’t be a story if they did. I think there could have been though. While making a commentary on grief and climate change, there are ideas here that could have been fleshed out a little more to make a more compelling story. Instead we got a weak mystery, an even more tepid thriller.
Dominic is a grieving widow who has no idea how to handle his children who are aged eighteen, seventeen, and nine. While his chapters could have offered great ruminations of grief and time and maybe even paralleled the grief of a world suffering from climate change, we instead get Dominic reducing his wife to just a mother, someone he loved and someone who loved and knew how to take care of their children, nothing more.
Rowan is painted as an independent woman determined to find out what happened to her husband, a researcher working at Shearwater, who through flashbacks is revealed to have separated from said husband because he wanted to have children while she didn’t because she didn’t believe it was an ethical thing to do with the world basically ending. She later has a revelation that her husband was a narcissist, though this is never shown in flashbacks and honestly wanting to have kids when she didn’t isn’t really proof of that. Now I’m not defending her husband because he is also revealed to be a groomer and creep, so an awful fictional man, but one who is also having a mental health crisis and the discussion on mental health is not great.
But guess where Rowan’s story leads? Being with the Salt family for six weeks means that her whole point of view of life changes. She falls madly in love with Dominic, his children, and decides that yes, she has always wanted to be a mother to them. And then HUGE SPOILER she dies trying to rescue one of the children.
There is nothing wrong with women choosing to be mothers, but there is something wrong with saying that the only good woman is a mother. And a dead one at that.
Also, what was up with the dead brother storyline? That was completely unnecessary.
My next big issue is with the children. I cannot remember all of their names, they were very strange, so I will use their ages. I can give some grace to the nine-year-old son because I believe canonically he lived on Shearwater his whole life and his whole thing is seeds. It’s literally all he knows, but I did have issues with how romantic relationships were shown with the other two kids. As mentioned, the seventeen-year-old daughter is groomed by Rowan’s husband, so a much older man and this is correctly shown as being a problem, but the eighteen-year-old son similarly is in an age-gap relationship with one of the researchers whose age is conveniently not given but I’d guess was in his mid-twenties, early-thirties who starts a relationship with the son when he is underage, but it’s okay because they don’t actually do anything until he’s eighteen.
I really don’t understand this double-standard. While I know that age gap relationships are more common in the queer community, it doesn’t mean an underage-gap relationship should be praised because “nothing happened” until the underaged person was legally an adult. It was such a bizarre contradiction that I can’t make any sense of.
Wild Dark Shore was not for me and I don’t know why people like it. I gave it an extra star because at least the writing is good, but yeah. Maybe Heather’s Picks are not Sarah’s Picks.
Publication: March 4 2025
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Pages: 300 pages (Hardcover)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Literary
My Rating: ⛤⛤
Summary:
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.
Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.
But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late―and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.
Sarah O'Connor 