- Ally Condie's new mystery novel "The Girls Trip" explores themes of nature's unpredictability.
- Set in a national park, three women meet through an online book group.
- Condie, inspired by Utah's landscapes, also teaches at BYU and values reader interactions.
SALT LAKE CITY — While writing her new novel, "The Girls Trip," Utah author Ally Condie had plenty of themes she wanted to explore, including one question in particular: Could an adult woman — and a mother, especially — "vanish" for a few days without someone needing her?
Condie's latest mystery novel, which comes out Tuesday, chronicles three women who connect through an online book group and decide to meet up for a "girls trip" in a national park, to get away from their lives for a few days. But then, one of the women actually does vanish, leading to a suspenseful, action-packed mystery.
She told the Deseret News the book was meant, in part, to "honor" women's book groups and "girls trips," which have played a role in her own life.
"The Girls Trip" is Condie's second novel for adults, following her 2024 thriller "The Unwedding," which was affected by a book group in its own way — "The Unwedding" was chosen by actress Reese Witherspoon for her influential book club.
The recognition from Witherspoon was meaningful, Condie said, because "I got to have the stamp of approval from someone who I really admire, who I think is a true reader and champion of women's stories."
Moving on from "The Unwedding" to write "The Girls Trip," Condie acknowledged that she felt "a little pressure, but largely just excitement that I got to play in this way again, that I got to write another mystery and have another chance."
How Utah's landscape influenced 'The Girl's Trip'
Condie is perhaps best known as the author of the bestselling "Matched" trilogy, a young adult dystopian series that first launched in 2010. The second novel in the trilogy, "Crossed," features what Condie calls a "fictionalized version" of Capitol Reef National Park. Her love of Utah's landscapes is a throughline in much of her work, from the 2016 middle grade novel "Summerlost" to her two adult novels.
Growing up in Cedar City with a father who was a federal magistrate for some of the national parks and federal lands, Condie says she grew up visiting Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks and feels a love for that part of the state, calling the landscape a "touchstone" since her childhood.
"The Utah landscape is just infinite with possibility," Condie said. "You could never get tired of it."
Following "The Unwedding," which was set at a resort in Big Sur that becomes isolated after a mudslide, Condie knew she wanted to return to the themes of nature and its unpredictability in "The Girls Trip."
"I love people in beautiful places where sort of man's hubris is rubbing up against nature's naturalness," she said. "Where, you know, we're building these glamping sites, we're doing this and that. But a flash flood can take you out, a landslide can — in the case of the Big Sur situation — make it so these fancy resorts are completely cut off.
"And so I was just thinking about hiking the Narrows and places like that as a kid. And it felt like a really great place to set the mystery."
At the heart of the novel, she says, is the idea of humanity being up against nature.
"You sort of assume (nature's) docility at your peril," Condie noted.
Teaching at BYU — and what Condie's working on next
Though Condie says she does have another adult novel after "The Girls Trip" in the works, she's not planning to leave behind writing for younger readers anytime soon.
The first book in a new chapter book series, "Penny and Laine‚" which she is co-writing with author Ann Dee Ellis, is due out in summer 2027. The three-book series will follow two best friends (named after Condie and Ellis' daughters) through a series of adventures.
She's also at work on three new picture books, as well as a young adult novel.
Though it could seem like a challenge to juggle a number of different projects, all aimed at different age levels, Condie says she feels like it fuels her creativity to be working on more than one project at a time.
"Sometimes it is a little difficult to transition from one to the other, but often it just feels great, because you kind of reach a point of fatigue of writing one work, and then you think, oh, I'll just go play in this other project that I'm not tired of today," she said. "So I actually quite love it."
Apart from her writing, Condie has also been teaching creative writing classes at Brigham Young University, which she calls "a real delight."
"They're very inspiring," she said of her students.
Teaching has influenced her own writing, she says, because it causes her to think outside of her own experience, looking for other ways of doing things or different ways of explaining things to her students.
Quoting poet and fellow BYU professor Lance Larsen, who previously served as Utah's poet laureate, Condie said, "He always says his favorite writers, or the writers that he most admires, are his students. And I think that's actually very true, because they're coming at it with — their ideas are so good and new and fresh, and they're interested, they're engaged. So it's a really happy place to be."
Meeting readers on 'Girls Trip' book tour is a 'big payoff moment'
To celebrate the release of "The Girls Trip," Condie will be embarking on a book tour, starting Tuesday, across several states — with two stops in Utah.
The first stop will be at Folklore Bookshop in Midway on Tuesday, followed by an event hosted by the King's English Bookshop and held at the Provo Library on Wednesday. And Condie's looking forward to getting to interact with readers.
"Writing is such a solitary process, often, that this, for me, is a big payoff moment, where I get to say, 'Oh my gosh, I made this, here you go, tell me what you think,'" she said.
Condie said that she sees these types of book events as the second part of the writing process, "when it's not just me in a room anymore." She enjoys interacting with readers not just from the perspective of a writer, but as a fellow reader herself.
"People are so inspiring and interesting and fun to talk to, and they'll ask you questions about your book that you never thought of yourself," she said. "And then they'll give you book recommendations or tell you something that they loved.
"It's just interacting with other readers, whether you're an author or just another reader in a book group. I love all of those things, so that's just another chance to get to do that."
