Running Wild by K.A Tucker

Updated: Jan 31, 2022

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

“When I’m with you, I forget about everything else. You make me feel like myself again.”

Running Wild is entertaining newest edition to K.A Tucker’s Wild series. It spins off from Calla and Jonah’s story to focus on Jonah’s best friend, Marie and can be read as a standalone.

After pining for her best friend for years, only to watch him marry another woman, veterinarian Marie Lehr knows unrequited love all too well and it’s a mistake she’s sworn she’ll never make again.

The trouble is, she can’t seem to find anyone who appeals to her even a fraction as much as the burly bush pilot did. Certainly not the handsome but arrogant competitive musher, Tyler Brader.

While volunteering at the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, Marie discovers that her first impressions may have been wrong and her attraction to Tyler is very real, if only his hear didn’t belong to someone else.

While Tyler is keen on staying friends, Marie’s been down that road before and knows how it ends. But no matter how hard she worked to keep her distance, it seems like she’s doomed to repeat her past mistakes.

Tyler settles an arm on my door where the window is rolled down...“Why do I feel like you’re trying to scare me away?” “Maybe I am.” “I don’t scare easily.”

I will say, as much as I enjoyed Running Wild and highly recommend it, it didn’t seem to grab my attention and draw me in as much as most of K.A Tuckers books normally do. I can’t quite describe it or really identify why that was, I loved the characters & the plot but I just didn’t feel that same level of engagement as I normally would.

I really liked how K.A Tucker handled addressing Marie’s feelings towards Jonah in Running Wild. That- at the time Running Wild takes place - it wasn’t so much that she was still in love with him but more that she’s longing for what could have been and what he & a relationship symbolised, more so than still having romantic feelings for Jonah himself.

I was expecting Running Wild to be more enemies to lovers, and when Marie & Tyler first meet, they definitely don’t like one another, there’s a lot of animosity between them, but they resolve those issues & end up on good terms with one another fairly early on in the book – too early for me to really consider it as falling into the enemies to lover’s trope.

But despite it not quite being the enemies to lovers’ story I had expected, I really did enjoy Marie & Tyler’s relationship. It did have a perfect amount of angst, which combined with the ease of their friendship, their intense chemistry, and Marie’s apprehension about repeating her past mistakes, made for some epic tension throughout the book.

“It’s not going to work.” I can’t go down this road again. “And this friendship of yours, Tyler? I don’t want it, either.”

I would have loved to have seen more of Marie & Tyler as a couple. Most of the book they spend as friends dancing around their attraction to one another, and the book ends rather soon after everything is resolved. But maybe someday down the track we might get a sort of slice of life novella where we’ll get to see that side of them a bit more.

I knew Tyler was still very much in love with someone else. A woman he still reaches for in the night, who he races a thousand miles across the Alaskan tundra for while wearing her name on his sleeve. I knew all this, and still I let myself fall for him.

As someone who isn’t at all familiar with sled dog racing, let alone the Iditarod specifically, I really appreciated how much for the book was focused on it & how K.A Tucker explained and described the sport, making it easy to understand without getting bogged down in the explanation or throwing off the pacing of the book with any info dumping.

The Simple Wild is one of my all-time favourite books and while they didn’t have a big part in Running Wild, I loved getting to see a little more of Jonah and Calla. I also loved getting to see them through someone else’s point of view.

Running Wild was a fun and compelling novel and I hope we get to see more of these loveable characters.

Content Warning - This book contains:

- animal abuse/cruelty - death of a loved one

- death of a child/stillborn - miscarriage