Non-fiction audiobook review: Where the Falcons Fly

It took a little patience, but I was finally able to get the library's audiobook of Adam Shoalts' latest, Where the Falcon Flies, which won in the "Journeys" category of the 2024 National Outdoor Book Awards.  I have a bunch of others still on hold!

 

Title: Where the Falcon Flies: A 3,400 Kilometre Odyssey From My Doorstep to the Arctic

Author: Adam Shoalts. Read by the author.

Publication Info: Penguin Canada, 2023.  10 hours. Original hardcover by Allen Lane, 2023, 364 pages

Source: Library

Publisher's Blurb (via Goodreads):
Looking out his porch window one spring morning, Adam Shoalts spotted a majestic peregrine falcon flying across the neighbouring fields near Lake Erie. Each spring, falcons migrate from southernmost Canada to remote arctic mountains. Grabbing his backpack and canoe, Shoalts resolved to follow the falcon’s route north on an astonishing 3,400-kilometre journey to the Arctic.

Along the way, he faces a huge variety of challenges and obstacles, including storms on the Great Lakes, finding campsites in the urban wilderness of Toronto and Montreal, avoiding busy commercial freighter traffic, gale force winds, massive hydroelectric dams, bushwhacking without trails, dealing with hunger, multiple bear encounters, and navigating white-water rapids on icy northern rivers far from any help.

In his signature style, Shoalts roams as much across space as he does time, winding his way through a stunning diversity of landscapes ranging from lush Carolinian forests to lonely windswept mountains, salty seas to trackless swamps, pristine lakes to glittering mega-cities, as well as the sites of long ago battles, shipwrecks, forgotten forts, and abandoned trading posts. Through his travels, he reveals how interconnected wild places are, from the loneliest depths of the northern wilderness to busy urban parks, and the vital importance of these connections.

Where the Falcon Flies invites readers on an extraordinary armchair adventure that spans five ecoregions and centuries of fascinating history, and is a masterwork by one of Canada’s most successful and audacious authors.

 

My Review:
This is another great adventure from a man who clearly was born to go on adventures. I've read a couple of his other books, and I like the out-there craziness of his undertakings. (I'm not sure why I haven't reviewed any of the others. Obviously, I liked them well enough to seek out more by the same author.) I'm also in awe of Shoalts' ability to do amazing physical feats on a diet that wouldn't keep me upright in my easy chair reading a book. He manages mind-boggling mileage hiking or paddling while eating one freeze-dried dinner and 7 granola bars a day, for weeks on end.

 

Adam Shoalts is a fantastic adventurer. I really enjoy his trips, though just as it would be for me traveling, I like the deep wilderness adventures better than the more urban aspects of the first half of the journey in this book. 

 

And yet. I don't think he's as good a writer as he is adventurer. Maybe I'm extra sensitized because I'm in editing mode, ruthlessly hunting down limp prose in my own work, but I kept being annoyed by his tendency to say things like "it could be quite dangerous to set out in winds like that." He always seemed to me, both in the writing and his narrative style, to be putting an extra distance between the reader and his own experience.

 

I don't remember being struck so much by this in the other books--maybe because they had more drama all along? Or maybe because this is the 3rd book about paddling a canoe far beyond where a sane person would go, and the adventures are starting to feel too alike? Whatever the reason, I was left feeling a bit unexcited about the book, despite greatly admiring the adventure and the adventurer.

 

My Recommendation:
I suspect this is better read than listened to. If nothing else, I really regretted not having the map that's in the front of the print editions. Google Maps is pretty danged useless in the Canadian far north! I also think that Beyond the Trees is a better place to start if you want to read his books.

 

FTC Disclosure: I checked Where the Falcon Flies out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  



Rebecca M. Douglass, 2025
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