The Nature of Disappearing by Kimi Cunningham Grant

Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I get into The Nature of Disappearing by Kimi Cunningham Grant. I received a copy of this book through NetGalley a few days before it was released (btw it’s out now!) and was super excited to get a copy because I had checked out Kimi’s other book These Silent Woods not too long ago and really enjoyed it. An aspect I enjoyed about These Silent Woods was the setting and Kimi’s ability to paint a setting for the reader, so knowing the setting in this one would be similar I was excited to get into it.

Main Characters:

• Emlyn: A nature guide who has a rough past, is thrown back into her past when her college best friend Janessa who she hasn’t spoken to in years goes missing and her ex-boyfriend Tyler comes to her looking for help to find her, given how she and Tyler’s relationship ended its weird he’s coming to her for help but she may be the only one to find her old friend
• Tyler: Emlyn’s ex-boyfriend who five years prior left their relationship off in a bad way but comes looking to her for help to find their mutual friend who he believes is missing in the woods after going on a trip with her boyfriend, seems insistent on bringing up the past and trying to fix it while Emlyn wants to avoid it
• Janessa: Was Emlyn’s best friend five years ago but ended their friendship after she hid her relationship with her childhood best friend Tyler from her, is a van life vlogger with her boyfriend so it is noticed by many when she goes missing
• Bush: Janessa’s boyfriend who travels with her and posts it on their YouTube channel

My Review

As mentioned before I was sent a free copy of The Nature of Disappearing by Kimi Cunningham Grant from NetGalley soon before its release, and it’s out now for all to check out. Despite receiving a copy of the book for free all reviews are honest and my true opinion.

When reading the blurb for The Nature of Disappearing  I was instantly interested because the plot reminded me of a recent true crime case. The Gabbi Petito case I personally didn’t follow closely at the time because I was horrified by how it was being handled by the media, and the way it became a conspiracy theory, and online sleuth case before Gabbi was even found. The Nature of Disappearing hits on similar issues when popular Van Life vlogger Janessa and her boyfriend Bush go missing and it’s noticed by many when they stop posting on social media and uploading on their regular days on YouTube. Quickly picked up by the media, but with very little evidence to go by, the situation is quickly blown out of the water by the media and thrown into a frenzy. Sitting in a coffee shop after taking a client fishing Emlyn is shocked to see her old best friend pop up on the news with a missing person under her picture. What she further can’t suspect is that her ex-boyfriend Tyler who almost destroyed her life five years earlier comes to her looking for her help to find Janessa. Tyler, convinced that with her lifelong outdoorsman skills, Emlyn will be able to find Janessa faster than anyone else, Emlyn is forced to question if she wants to leave the warm safe life she has now created for herself to enter into a potential lion’s den.

I gave The Nature of Disappearing a 7/10. I enjoyed the book a lot in the first bit, but some of the peaks and twists in my opinion were a bit predictable leading me to guess where the book was going to go before we got there. As in These Silent Woods, a previous book I read of Kimi’s, the characters and setting are truly what make this book. This book is labelled as a thriller, suspense, crime fiction, novel. While that’s very true in some parts I would say that this book is very mildly thrilling. I don’t say that as a bad thing at all, but if you’re going into this book thinking it’s going to be filled with thrilling twists and gut-wrenching suspense, this isn’t one of them. The thrill and suspense in it I feel like fits the pace of the book better. If it was super heavy on those themes it wouldn’t match the serene calm setting that Kimi was creating to hide the chaos. It was interesting because oftentimes I would get swept up into her descriptions and forget why the characters were in the woods at that moment, and it wasn’t for something as beautiful as the setting we were reading was. It really felt like at moments you were with Emlyn walking in the woods with her, and it made the book have this kind of calm sense to it when in reality it was anything but.

Throughout the book, we get past and present perspectives from Emlyn. In the present she tells us about what’s going on with her and Tyler’s search for Janessa, and in the past why her relationship with both Janessa and Tyler ended. I found I enjoyed the past perspectives a bit more than the present ones, and while there was lots of suspense at the end of the present parts, the past parts all together felt a bit more gripping in terms of the suspense. I felt like The Nature of Disappearing is more so a book that focuses on the repair and destruction of relationships, the fragility of friendship, and overcoming trauma. It made it more so of a book where we see if things can be repaired between Emlyn and Tyler despite everything that went on in their past, and if repairing their relationship can help them find a person they both care about. The drama of the mystery of what happened to Janessa is definitely interesting, but the past behind Emlyn and Tyler is what got my interest more. I just wanted to know what he did to her to end this seemingly really good relationship.

I would really recommend checking out The Nature of Disappearing by Kimi Cunningham Grant if you love a character-centered novel with a strong interesting setting. It was a great weekend read that didn’t take me long to get through at all, but that’s also because it was enjoyable and hard to put down.

Have you read The Nature of Disappearing by Kimi Cunningham Grant or any of her other books before? What did you think?

Thank you for checking out this review! I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to check out my socials @baddiebookreviews to be kept up to date for when I release a new review.