"This raw, brutal, unconventional story of a girl on-the-run in the wilderness in the 17th-century New World boasts formidable fairy-tale atmosphere and a potent spirit of survival."
Set in 1610, after its 15-year-old protagonist has fled a famine- and disease-ridden colony in Virginia (though the historic context is initially withheld to potent effect), Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds is an extraordinarily inventive novel of surviving the wilderness, and striving to find a new way to exist.
The storytelling is vivid and sinewy, nimble as a fairy tale fae navigating a tangled forest, much like the servant girl we meet traversing such terrain by moonlight to escape the deathly colony. While running, she hears voices descending from the snow-speckled sky. Though they chastise her for leaving her mistress, she keeps running until “her skin prickled full of fire”. She fashions a shelter, sparks fire, slips into sleep, but night terrors disturb her: “The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care, it could not care, what happened to her, not one bit.”
Through the bitter, biting cold, from cave to close encounters with wild creatures, and through flashbacks to early traumas as an orphan in a poorhouse, her voyage to the New World with her mistress, and life in the colony, the girl’s journey is electrifying. Shot-through with faith, resilience and self-reflective wisdom, The Vaster Wilds is as boldly profound as the best of fables.
| Primary Genre | Historical Fiction |
| Other Genres: | |
| Recommendations: |
