Katie's Reviews > The Vaster Wilds

Begins with a young girl running away from her home. Fifty pages later she's still running. Running to stand still it feels like. This is historical fiction without any history. Dystopian fiction without any dystopia. Mostly it felt like an experiment in creative writing. As if it began as a short story - which for me it should have remained - and was fattened up like a Christmas turkey. I really like Lauren Groff but the two books of hers I haven't liked have both gone back into history for their subject matter. My feeling is she ought to stick to writing about contemporary life. At times this read like a girl scout's guide to surviving in the wild. I also had the feeling she had been reading too much Cormac McCarthy as her prose style with all its religious grandeur resembled his. A disappointment for me. It kind of proves that what makes people interesting is their interactions with other people. Only writers of genius can write a compelling novel of unremitting solitude.