Gina K. Trehus drew on her roots in small-town North Dakota to write a debut novel that follows one woman from a childhood lesson about bullying through a murder she was never supposed to witness, eleven years in hiding, infertility, and a walk home that ties it all together.
MANDAN, N.D. — When Amalia Rose was eight years old, her father asked her to do something strange. He handed her a piece of paper and told her to crumple it up, stomp on it, and make a mess of it — but not to rip it. Then he told her to smooth it out and say sorry to the paper.
She refused. She didn’t see the point.
Her father pointed at the creases. No matter how many times you apologize, he told her, those scars will always be there. That’s what bullying does. That’s what cruelty does. You can’t un-crumple a person.
That lesson sits at the center of Let’s Take a Walk, a debut novel by Gina K. Trehus of Mandan, North Dakota. It is also, in many ways, the thing the entire book is about — what happens to someone who gets crumpled, and whether they can build something whole from what’s left.
A life told through one long walk
The novel follows Amalia Rose, a young woman from a small town who grows up struggling with asthma, bullying, and the quiet conviction that she isn’t good enough. She’s placed in a resource room at school and assumes it confirms what the other kids already think. She finds her footing through martial arts, softball, and a tight circle of friends she meets across elementary school, junior high, and college — Jess, Madeley, Emilay, Irelaynd — women who stick with her long after graduation, through moves and marriages and the kind of life that doesn’t slow down to let you catch up.
After college, the group relocates to California. They save for three years to take a trip to Hawaii together. They have ladies’ nights where someone always gets pranked. They are, in Amalia’s words, the six musketeers. The early chapters read like a scrapbook of the friendships women build in their twenties — the kind that become load-bearing walls in a life.
Then Amalia loses her job over small clerical errors she was never told about. Unable to sleep, she decides to walk to her best friend’s house before sunrise. She wanders off the road. She stumbles into an abandoned building. And she witnesses a murder she was never supposed to see.
A witness who can’t stop being found
What follows is a story that shifts from a coming-of-age narrative into something far more dangerous. The two women who committed the murder chase Amalia into a bookshop, take hostages, and fire a gun at her through a plate-glass window. A sheriff intervenes. Amalia uses her martial arts training to disarm one of the women. She ends up in the hospital with a concussion. Her friends and family are placed into protective custody for eleven years.
She moves back to Mandan, North Dakota — the place she grew up, a town small enough that she reasons nobody would think to look there. She reconnects with her parents. She tends a garden full of peas and corn and sunflowers. She pitches for a women’s softball team. She starts to rebuild.
She meets a man named Nephreau at a dance club. He asks her to dance to a country song. He writes his number on a napkin. They marry on a cruise ship with a green-and-blue color scheme. He works for the government, though he won’t say more than that. He tells her: “As long as you are with me, you’re as safe as you can be.” She doesn’t yet know how literally he means it.
The part of the book that doesn’t let go
Midway through the novel, Amalia and Nephreau try to start a family. She is diagnosed with PCOS, fibroid tumors, and stage 4 endometriosis. They pursue IVF. The first attempt ends in a miscarriage at three months. A second pregnancy fails before it can take hold. They take out a loan for one final try.
Trehus writes these chapters without sentimentality and without medical euphemism. Amalia sits on the bathroom floor looking at a fertilized egg that didn’t survive. She blames herself. She feels like a failure. Her husband holds her and says: “You are not alone in this. I am right here along with you.” They wait sixteen days for a test result that feels like a lifetime repeated over and over.
The third attempt works. But Amalia develops a critically low platelet count at six months and is hospitalized in the ICU. The killers from California, now released from prison, discover her location through a double agent inside her husband’s own agency. They break into the house, handcuff her to the headboard, and hold a gun to her head while she is having contractions.
SWAT breaches the bedroom. The baby, Evelyn Rose — their rainbow baby — is delivered by C-section after six weeks of hospitalization. Seven pounds, two ounces.
Where it comes from
Trehus grew up in Mandan, North Dakota, the same town where most of the novel is set. The landscape details — the road with trees that grow together into a tunnel of leaves in summer, the ditches full of cattails, the meadowlarks flying in and out of barley fields, the five-degree winter mornings with a slight breeze in the crisp North Dakota air — are written by someone who has lived inside them, not researched them.
The novel draws on themes Trehus has navigated personally: the experience of learning differently and being placed in a resource room, the friendships between women that outlast geography and time, and the reality of health challenges that don’t follow a straight line. The book is dedicated to her family — her mother, father, sister Kayla, and grandmother — and to those who are no longer here, with the note: “It’s never goodbye, but always see you later.”
The image that stays
In the novel’s final pages, Amalia is standing in a hospital room holding her newborn daughter. Her husband is crying for only the second time she’s ever seen. Morning light is coming through the window. She looks down at Evelyn Rose and thinks about that crumpled piece of paper from when she was eight.
She had become that paper. Stomped on, smoothed out, scarred. But the baby in her arms was something new — blank, untouched, a whole life ahead of her full of walks she couldn’t imagine yet.
The book closes with Amalia, Nephreau, and Evelyn walking down the road toward town on a North Dakota evening, the sky painted orange and pink, meadowlarks calling across the fields the same way they did when Amalia was a child. She is asked if she’s ready to go home.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m ready.”
Publication Details
Title: Let’s Take a Walk
Author: Gina K. Trehus
Genre: Fiction / Women’s Fiction / Coming-of-Age
Copyright © 2025 Gina K. Trehus
Gina K. Trehus is available for interviews and media appearances.
For Any Media Inquiries, Please Contact Sia Stone
Email: sia@parkerpublishers.com
Phone no: +1 (689) 304-8480
