So Far Gone

 

So Far Gone by Jess Walter

Fiction

Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

2025

Finished on July 27, 2025

Rating: (4.5/5 Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

A reclusive journalist is suddenly thrown into a wild, suspenseful journey to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter and her belligerent new husband, Rhys Kinnick finally snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched the jerk. Immediately horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the world around him, and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out the car window and fled for a remote cabin in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

Seven years later, when his grandchildren show up on his doorstep, Rhys barely recognizes them. Their mother has disappeared, and they need a safer place to stay than with their father, who has taken up with a Christian Nationalist militia. So what if Rhys’s cabin has no electricity or indoor plumbing, and the raccoons help themselves to the monthly grocery haul? He'll do whatever he needs to for these sweet kids.

But when the militia members show up and kidnap the children, Rhys realizes he'll have to re-enter the broken world. With the help of a bipolar retired detective and his caustic ex-girlfriend, Rhys reluctantly heads off on a madcap journey through the rubble of the life he left behind.

Susan, over at The Cue Card, mentioned this novel at the beginning of July, and it's one that was offered up for influencers on Libro.fm, so I quickly downloaded the audiobook. I was not disappointed. Like Susan, this was my first read by Jess Walters, and it won't be my last. I enjoyed the audio quite well, and Edoardo Ballerini does a great job with the narration. It's a difficult book to categorize, as it's partly a mystery and partly political commentary, with a madcap rescue by Rhys (who I envisioned as Christopher Lloyd) and his pals. There is violence, which when heard rather than read felt pretty intense, and I found myself cringing in response to some of the details. The novel felt like a mash-up of a Cormac O'Conner mystery (William Kent Krueger) and Kevin Wilson's hilarious Nothing to See Here. Check out Susan's spoiler-free review here, which goes into more depth about the plot. She shares the following quote, which I would have marked had I read the print edition:

As a journalist. As an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency. Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.

At some point, you look around, and think, I don’t belong here anymore. I don’t want to have anything to do with any of this.

Don't let the politics scare you off. So Far Gone had me laughing more than grumbling, and the raccoon scene is worth the price of the book alone! Great dialogue, well-drawn characters, excellent pacing, combined with the Pacific Northwest setting made for an entertaining listen. And as luck would have it, I actually have another novel (Beautiful Ruins) by Jess Walters on my TBR shelf. I'm looking forward to finally giving that one a read!

I received a complimentary copy from Libro.fm. All thoughts and opinions are my own.