Lauren Groff: Vaster Wilds (2023, Cornerstone Publishing)
English language
Published May 16, 2023 by Cornerstone Publishing.
I don’t know what to say about this. It turned the 17th century inside out for me: what if the colonists weren’t so imbued with the entire ideology of early modern England? I loved the slow shift of the girl from her restricted world into the new wilderness she comes to love and how it shifts everything she knows.
A simple story of survival in the early colonial American wilderness gracefully deepens into poetic meditations on nature, geography, guilt, death, history, and culture.
First DNF of the year. I got 50% of the way through and only had 2 more audiobook hours to finish, so I was tempted to force my way to the end… but why?
I liked the start of this - the stakes are high with this girl on the run in winter in colonial Virginia. But then it becomes quite repetitive as she faces various episodic dangers and bouts of hunger and cold. Flashbacks help break it up, but when a story is just bleak event after bleak event, it honestly gets dull. I don’t know what Groff was going for here. Thematically it didn’t feel like anything new was done or said about human suffering. She also didn’t make a lot of use of the particular time and place she set the story.
