A Den Designed to Set You Free

Gerri Hill is the sapphic world’s modern-day Walt Whitman. Her novels, as varied in genre as they are vast, usually pulse with a natural, earthy underpinning that I devour. Lyon’s Den—possibly Hill’s most outdoorsy yet—is a love letter to the open air of the Colorado mountains.

This enemies-to-lovers trope—one of Hill’s signature sapphic themes—banishes Joni James, a Manhattanite city slicker, to a wilderness retreat in search of a scathing angle for the magazine article her editor is forcing her to write. There, amid towering pines and crystalline air, she meets Kendall Lyon, a heartbroken woman whose search for life’s meaning led her to open Lyon’s Den: a refuge for women ready to rewrite their own stories.

As with—dare I say—all of Hill’s work, Lyon’s Den bursts with adventure, told in prose that is clean, elegant, and romantically dazzling. Her characters are delicately flawed, layered like sediment shaped by time and experience. As we uncover those layers, we’re treated to something more profound than the love story itself. The true heart of this novel is nature and the transformative magic of the wild. Hill suggests that hiking, rappelling, climbing, or simply grounding—feeling the earth beneath our feet—is a kind of primal ritual, a reminder of how small we are in the grand scheme of things, and how freeing that realization can be.

What sets this novel apart from Hill’s extensive body of work is its plot premise and setting. This wilderness camp, to which wealthy women flock to change their lives, race through obstacle courses, and swing from some of the oldest and tallest trees in the US. In just 266 pages, Hill offers a whispered invitation: step outside. Explore the possibilities that surround us in the great, breathing world beyond screens and skyscrapers. Take a breath of mountain air. Let bare feet meet wild ground. Pause. Absorb beauty.

Hill leaves me longing to participate in an all-women’s wilderness retreat—a month in the mountains to reclaim the kind of clarity and reverence we so easily lose. This novel is the definition of a breath of fresh air.