Review: "If I Dig You" by Colby Wilkens

If I Dig You by Colby Wilkens
Published March 2025 via St. Martin's Griffin
★★★

Fourteen years ago, Isi's mother disappeared. Isi's never had closure, and since her best friend Louise left on a dig, she hasn't had closure there either—not with their friendship and not with her unresolved feelings. Lou is back, but things have never been the same.

It looks as though they'll both keep struggling along—until a surprise visit catapults them into the woods and into an unasked-for adventure that tests the strength of their friendship...and forces them both to ask if the risk of upsetting the status quo might be worth the reward.

I picked this up partly for the archeology theme (both characters are archeologists, and they end up searching for lost Cherokee treasure) and partly for the queer romance and partly because, you know, into the woods. I love me a good into-the-woods story. The Cherokee material is super interesting—I hadn't heard of this lost treasure before, and I've been curious about archeology fiction since reading Excavations. Wilkens is part Choctaw-Cherokee,* Isi is part Cherokee, and though I'm not usually one for supernatural material (keeping it vague to avoid spoilers) I actually really enjoyed the way that heritage plays into the story.

Now. I'm bad at suspending disbelief. This is a theme in my reviews. Normally the supernatural element here might have given me trouble, but again, in this case I didn't mind. However...I struggled with quite a lot of things in the rest of the book. There's the way characters jump to conclusions: Isi's mother is "declared deceased" (loc. 28**) six weeks after going missing, and I'm not an expert but that is a wildly fast timeline to decide that someone is dead (missing, presumed dead...maybe? Maybe. But not definitively deceased, not with the limited information they had). There's an assumption that a daughter searching for her missing mother must be doing so because the daughter knows Major Secrets rather than because...she misses her mother. There's an assumption that if someone rings your doorbell when you aren't expecting them, you should burn it all down. (You think I am exaggerating. I am not.) I'm also a little puzzled by the timeline—why have fourteen years passed, and not, say, four? Seems sort of odd that the baddies would hang out and do nothing for so long, or that Isi wouldn't have noticed oddities in her mother's home sooner; seems very, very, very odd that Isi's mother somehow still has a desk at the university where she taught (she wouldn't after four years of disappearance either, mind, but still).

Even getting past all that, I don't understand how Isi and Lou don't end up dead. I just don't. They head into the woods woefully unprepared—plastic ballet flats and rations totalling half a protein bar per person per day. (Again: you think I am exaggerating. I am not. The author has clearly never tried hiking on insufficient food, because I can tell you that it doesn't work in real life the way it works out for Isi and Louise.) They're fleeing from danger, but they never make it far before heading back into danger's camp, or stopping to have a heart-to-heart, or turning on a flashlight or building a fire that would immediately alert anyone around them to their location. We're told that it can get down to thirty at night (that's below freezing!), but they never hesitate to wade into whatever water they come across, often fully clothed—thus sending their chances of hypothermia sky-high. At one point there's a fall, and Louise spends a few moments wondering whether Isi is dead or critically injured before getting distracted by...glowworms. Because priorities. Neither of them is particularly troubled by one woman ending up barefoot, or making out when neither of them has seen a toothbrush in days (romance novel logic)...okay, the latter isn't really a survival thing, but it stretched the bounds of my imagination. (How do their libidos continue to rage unchecked when they should be tired and hungry and cold and in pain and scared?) At one point Louise insists that the only way they will survive is if Isi immediately destroys one of her few pieces of clothing and uses the last of their matches to make a torch, now, there's no time to waste, because it's...crucial that that happen before Louise joins Isi in a space that might not have an exit? I don't know. I read that section three times to try to figure out the thought process, and I still don't understand. There's a situation that puts everyone but Isi in extreme danger, for reasons, and when reinforcements arrive...Isi and Louise do exactly nothing to warn said reinforcements about that danger. (Oh boy.)

This feels like a great draft that still needs a couple of big rounds of edits. I was thrilled that it was an into-the-woods book (I'm always thrilled when it's an into-the-woods book), but I would have found it so much more believable if Isi and Louise had taken the time to go home, dig out their outdoors gear, pack their bags full of rations, and then go into the woods to race against time to beat the baddies at their own game. (And—at one point a snake is described as "wet and slimy" (loc. 2339), which is not how snakes work—they're quite smooth and dry. I don't think either the author or the editor is an outdoorsy person? Which is fine, obviously, but Isi's wet and slimy rattlesnake highlights the importance of books that take place in the woods getting a read by an outdoorsy person during the editing process.)

It's still a cute romance, and if you like your relationships high on angst and aren't really an into-the-woods person yourself, you'll probably struggle with this less than I did. I might pick up another of the author's books in the future—I just won't take Isi or Louise's lead in planning for my next backpacking trip.

Thanks to the author and publisher for inviting me to read a review copy through NetGalley.

*This was according to the bio that came with my ARC, but it sounds like it has since come out that this is not the case after all. I wrote this review in blissful ignorance and am leaving the review intact, but I'm...disappointed, let's say, and doubt I'll be picking up future books.

**Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.