HIKING UNDERGROUND
Nothing happens, and everything happens …
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The Breathing World: An Interview with Amy Smiley, author of Hiking Underground
An intimate conversation with Amy Smiley: Valerie Grimes, Clinical Hypnotist
Interview with Amy Smiley: Mary Woodbury, Dragonfly.eco
Hiking Underground explores the subtle ways in which the natural world can offer new perspectives and give our lives new meaning… Amy Smiley depicts a nontraditional New York City experienced primarily via its natural wonders… Each of the three protagonists grows and learns through the lens of nature, inspiring a deeper understanding of art, the world, and one another…
Hiking Underground dives deep into the mental landscapes of each character, revealing how their troubles evolve and dissipate as they seek answers from the natural world… Smiley’s prose takes the helm, urging the reader on with rhythmic sentences, using nuanced language to depict well-limbed landscapes. With a world rendered through different perspectives – that of a mother, an adult daughter, and a young son Smiley shows the reader how experience affects perception…With each character, the reader is invited to marvel at the scenery, from the smallest earthworm to the expanse of ocean seen from the Maine coast.
Hiking Underground is a work of emotion over action, of rumination, even illumination, rather than thrill… The reader is left sitting with the question of the city versus the country which, they will find, isn’t a binary at all. Both exist simultaneously, both within and without...
Smiley presents Hiking Underground as a celebration of the earth rather than a premonition of the earth’s end… Smiley remind(s) us why we love the world we’re in, why we should hang onto it. Why we should revel in what’s all around us.
– Nick Rees Gardner
Independent Book Review
Hiking Underground… explores the things in life we might normally find mundane, but Smiley views it through an insightful and thoughtful lens. The author shows readers this intriguing world through different perspectives which allow the audience to gain an empathetic view on life’s simplicities through the eyes of a child, an artist, and a mother… It sets a really beautiful tone… The author… spark[s] empathy within her readers and inspire[s] a deeper appreciation to the simple experiences of everyday life. This book that will easily be enjoyed by readers who like reflective and emotionally resonant books. I would recommend reading this absorbing book if you are an artist, even one at heart. The retrospect displayed in Hiking Underground was profound. I think the artistic value will be fully realized by readers who are artistically inclined. https://literarytitan.com/2023/01/07/hiking-underground/
Literary Titan
https://literarytitan.com/2023/01/26/into-an-unknown-landscape/
"Was the whole world dreaming, or just one young woman?"
Hiking Underground is a novel about ordinary daily life in New York City that assumes the surreal overlay of descriptive personal experience… Amy Smiley draws… individuals and their dreams together with the deftness of a tightly-knitted emotional quilt of dreams. She captures… a sense of life's changes and the unexpected influences that both attract and pull apart individuals, families, and relationships. Her close attention builds atmospheric detail, philosophical and psychological reflection, and close inspection of other characters' lives…
As mother and son move through urban and nature worlds, the paintings and metamorphosis that links [the three characters] become evocative dances that move through seemingly disparate personalities to make deft connections. The result is a novel that reaches out and grasps the heart of life's progression and the family relationships that form, break away, then rejoin in unexpected ways. Libraries looking for powerful stories of everyday life juxtaposed against the undercurrent of extraordinary abilities and observations will find the descriptions and connections of Hiking Underground a surreal, compelling attraction.
http://donovansliteraryservices.com/february-2023-issue.html
– D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer,
Midwest Book Review
In Hiking Underground, three urban naturalists explore the relationship between art and reality in episodic reveries about nature. Although the narratives ostensibly take place mostly in parks in Manhattan and Maine, the real action is in the minds of the characters as they explore the great outdoors and grow as artists and as individuals.
It worked, thematically, for me to think of the three main characters, Adam, Alice and Emma, as the same person at different stages of development ...
As an artist, Emma has preserved the teenager’s “fierce emotion” and the child’s wonder of nature. In one scene in Central Park, Emma, caught in a rainstorm and muddy, reenacts a mythic scene of a nymph bathing in sacred ponds. The child’s obsession with myth continues in the adult such that it still frames her perceptions. Emma is Adam grown up, but still a child ... Indeed, to some extent, the end point of the story seems to be the convergence of these perspectives into Emma, who, it turns out, is the true focal character by the end of the novel ... Emma understood “the things that [Adam] had trouble telling anybody else. She even knew before he told her – sometimes before he even knew himself – that he was thinking about something.”If the story is eschewing the conventions of time and individuality in the way I’m suggesting, then that might account partly for the surreal tone throughout. The characters also project sentience on the objects around them; everything is alive and feels; their empathy makes the descriptions of the woods, the streams, and the earth surreal ... Here it may be relevant to note that in her early career, Smiley wrote a full-length study on surrealist poet Louis Aragon.
One of the techniques I most appreciated was Smiley’s method for showing the interiority of the characters. As scenes are described, the narrator articulates the character’s subconscious perceptions of the external world and verbalizes the character’s distant memories or associated feelings that hang, subconsciously, on to the perceptions. It is a type of stream of consciousness expressed, through the omniscient narrator, in complete sentences, providing the full context, so that the reader is not left wondering about idiosyncratic references. There is a fullness to all the descriptions and reflections that is very unusual... As a study in empathy,
Hiking Underground delivers. Smiley keeps the reader rapt in anticipation, waiting not for some plot conflict resolution, but for the different variations on the novel’s theme to converge, which they do, with delightful intricacy. Smiley writes for artists.”
https://dactylreview.com/2023/01/27/hiking-underground-by-amy-smiley/
– V.N. Alexander, author of "Locus Amoenus", 2015 • Dactyl Review