Lorna's Reviews > The Vaster Wilds

One can always depend on Lauren Groff to change it all up with each book she publishes. During the pandemic of 2020, Groff turned her attention to Marie de France, a cloistered prioress in a remote twelfth century convent France. It was at that time, she realized that she liked writing historical fiction and has decided to write a trilogy of different periods of history all from the perspective of a woman. And so we have the second book in the trilogy, The Vaster Wilds, a story of a young girl who has fled the early Jamestown colony in the seventeenth century. At the time Jamestown was suffering from smallpox, famine, disease, pestilence, and many other social ills. We only know her as the girl although she is thought to be about sixteen or seventeen years old at the time as she flees into the vast wilderness with a sack containing a pewter cup she had stolen and her few precious things: the two thick and warm brown coverlets, the biting hatchet, the knife and the flint. She grew up in a London poorhouse where the nuns called her Lamentations because her mother was a prostitute. At age four years of age, she came to the Jamestown colony as the servant to a woman who called her Zed. Her survival skills are incredible as she designs makeshift shelters from rocks and hollow trees with her blankets. She feeds herself on fish and eggs and berries when she can, as well as wood grubs if need be. As the trek continues, I found myself lapsing into a rhythm of the girl's journey. And as the girl travels on, the beautiful and haunting prose takes on a dreamlike quality, often bordering on the sublime. We begin to slowly learn more about the girl's past as the story evolves. This is a book of oppositions between wild and tame, forest and settlements, humans and beasts that often take on new meaning. The Vaster Wilds is a testament to the struggle for survival of an individual and a hymn to the endurance of an individual as well as a very spiritual book. What can I say, it was intense, it was raw, and it was beautiful. It is a book that I won't soon forget..

"And she did not turn back to look upon the gleam of the fort's fires as they painted up the night sky above in red."

"She had learned the lesson of only forward movement from the wife of Lot, who had glanced backward once as she was fleeing the destruction of sodom and by her weakness and the wrath of god had been transformed to a pillar of salt."