Cheri's Reviews > The Vaster Wilds

’The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles.
In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.
Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight.’

’The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.’

’Into the night the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing.
A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past.
It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free. ‘

This is the story of this young woman’s journey as she sees the death of so many in the household where she is tasked with caring for the youngest member of the family, until there is no need, and then she is forced to care for the eldest on his deathbed. She steals a pair of boots off the son whose death was recent, some gloves and a cloak off the mistress, and leaves.

This is the story of a life, and a journey to find a place to call home, of both beauty and danger along the way. A journey of finding a place where one feels safe and secure, even as she travels alone through the wilderness. Always having to be more careful, and once she leaves, she has left behind any of those who have offered her even the smallest of gestures, food, water, a roof over her head.

This is a story of a life, how the only one she loved, and who she believed loved her is gone, and how she navigates her life in the years that follow.

’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.’
She was a mote, a speck, a floating windborne fleck of dust.

A beautifully written story, an ode to Nature, and the solace found there.