Plot: Lily Wilder is miserable. Her dad, a famous archeologist and deadbeat dad, sold off the family farm that was her life plan to manage, then promptly died. So for the last decade, she’s been making ends meet running a tour company based on, to her endless chagrin, his supposed claims to have found and hidden an enormous fortune in the deserts of Utah. The plan is to buy back the farm one day, but that’s more of a dream than the goal at the end of a concrete plan of any kind, since Lily is still in debt and has no savings or plans on how to get any savings with which to make such a purchase. Still, she’s sick of this life and has plans on closing down the tour company and doing some, anything else. Who else walks in on what might be her last tour group ever but the boyfriend that ghosted her over a decade ago and who she is very much not over. Fortunately, he’s not over her either. Less fortunately, the tour is about to go sideways, and hard. Shenanigans ensue.
The goal of this book, as I understand it from their authors’ note, was to write a classic adventure story to help us forget about *gestures at everything*. As a 1999 Mummy devotee, you can believe I was 10,000% on board with this. The problem I find is that the idea and the execution don’t really mesh particularly well. When I think of peak adventure stories like the Mummy or to a lesser extent Indiana Jones (yup, come at me), the key is that they are fun. There may be danger, but it’s usually campy. The risks never feel real, and certainly not grounded in real world dangers. Instead, the focus is on charismatic characters throwing around banter and jokes and getting drunk while fighting off world ending, supernatural monsters.
That is not the case with Something Wilder. While there are the odd attempts at humor (which do land), they are very few and very far between. The real core of the story is the intense heartbreak and trauma experienced by our leads, the low grade depression they’ve been living with since they parted, and the very real, very real world dangers they face which I won’t spoil for you. The description for the book says that “the trip goes horribly and hilariously wrong” and I just couldn’t disagree more. The story flows well and you get to learn a lot of survivalist stuff and most of the time I couldn’t put it down, but I didn’t have fun reading it. It read much more like a thriller than an adventure comedy. This might be one of those things where good direction and good actors could turn it into a comedy (much like the all star casting in the Mummy), but on paper, it just didn’t work for me.