Book Review: The Vaster Wilds

The Vaster Wilds
by Lauren Groff
Review by Alex A

This story was utterly captivating! I was steadily drawn into the Girl’s story of human grit and survival, set in the unforgiving yet glorious American wilderness.  

The Vaster Wilds is a taut, precisely-crafted allegory, following a young girl’s flight into the early colonial American wilds. The backstory of the protagonist’s life is gradually revealed, as we hurtle through a landscape peppered with threats. As her journey progresses, she slowly understands her place in a greater and more intricate tapestry of life. The visceral descriptions of her suffering through starvation, injury and illness are bleak but riveting. The reader keenly feels these hardships and the relief of every hard-won bite of life-sustaining food. 

Questioning the limits of human adaptation, this book examines our own culpability in the face of systemic oppression, and probes the struggle to turn away from established structures and create a new way of being in the world.