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Book Summary and Reviews of The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

The Vaster Wilds

A Novel

by Lauren Groff

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  • Published:
  • Sep 2023, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive

A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.

Lauren Groff's new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
  1. The Vaster Wilds is, among other things, a survival story, and survival narratives have a long history in Western culture, from classics like Robinson Crusoe to popular American children's books such as My Side of the Mountain and Hatchet to more contemporary nonfiction including Into the Wild and reality TV like Naked and Afraid and Alone. How is Groff's novel in conversation with American mythology about survival, and how does it dispel those myths?
  2. The female protagonist escapes a colonial Virginia settlement where people are starving and many are dying. In the wilderness, the girl encounters Indigenous people who have a profoundly different way of life. What does she learn about the contrast between the European and ...
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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Extraordinary… Groff builds and maintains suspense on multiple levels, while offering an unflinching portrayal of her heroine's desperation and will to survive. This is a triumph." ­—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Groff's seventh book, a captivating survival story, starts off running….this wholly enveloping book has … deep examinations of faith, dominion, and human nature; Groff's seemingly joyfully related, seamless period prose; and the time-collapsing sense of reading a text channeled directly from the mind of a long-ago-living, breathing woman facing extraordinary circumstances." —Booklist (starred review)

"Groff's imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine… Immersion in the girl's experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization … The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic." —­Kirkus Reviews

"A fittingly adventurous effort from one of our best writers, but one yielding the growing sense that we've seen that tree before." —Library Journal

"Combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep … Lauren Groff's fifth novel, set in Virginia in the early 17th century, is a classic study of solitude and survival that stars a teenage girl fleeing starvation—and the scene of a crime." —Shelf Awareness

"Illustrate[s] a fluid, almost cyclical understanding of history, and faith's sticky place within it." ­—Elle

This information about The Vaster Wilds was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Cathryn Conroy

A Daring Literary Achievement: No Plot, One Character, a Very Sad Ending…and I Couldn't Stop Reading
I will confess right from the get-go that Lauren Groff is one of my favorite authors. If she writes it, I read it. That said, while I am in awe of the literary power of this book, it is not for everyone.

There is no plot. There is only one character, and she doesn't have a name other than "Girl," although she is sometimes called Lamentations Callat, Wench, or Zed. Much of the narrative reads and feels like a fever dream. And the ending is sad…so very, very sad.

It's the early 1600s. Girl, who is about 16 or 17 years old, flees in the middle of a frigid winter night from an early colonial American settlement, probably Jamestown. Everyone is starving. People are dying of hunger and disease. She steals the boots of a boy who died of smallpox and swipes her mistress's heavy cloak. Into a sack she packs a pewter cup, a flint, a knife, a hatchet, and two lice-infested brown coverlets. And off she goes, running as fast as she can in the hopes she can escape before they come looking for her. She knows they will come searching, and if they find her, it will be a violent end. So she must get away—fast. Because what she did is not forgivable.

Girl survives by her wits, battling nature from winter's cold to wild beasts, battling herself and her body's need for food, water, warmth, and rest, and battling man, including one who tries to stone her to death. Taking place over a few weeks, the novel is the story of her flight and survival through the wilderness as she tries to walk to Canada (without any real idea of where she is going), as well as numerous flashbacks to her life in England and her life in the colonial settlement. Until she was four years old, she was in an orphanage/poorhouse in England when she was purchased by a family needing a servant. The mistress treats her kindly, adopting her as a kind of pet, but the teenage son abuses her horribly. The mistress is widowed, and her second husband, a minister, takes the family to the New World against their wishes.

Deftly written in a way that makes prose seem like poetry, this is a book to be savored and reread. It is not suspenseful, it is not a page-turner, but it is captivating and almost seductive. I felt Girl's fear, her body's cold, her hunger, her determination, and her courage. I felt like I was out there in the dark forests with her as she trudged north, as she slowly reveals her secrets to the reader.

This novel is an inspired tribute to the power of the individual to choose a life that is different from the community, to forge a path that no one else has taken, to live a new life. Lauren Groff has written what I can only describe as a daring literary achievement.

Gloria M

Compelling!!
This is the first book I have read by bestselling author Lauren Groff.  In my defense I have multiple long lists and piles of fiction that I want to consume, and I only have so much time-one has to eat and sleep and do laundry!.  But after being unable to put down her latest, "The Vaster Wilds" I am so looking forward to perusing her older novels!

Groff writes with a deft, inventive, emotional hand.  The reader will feel cold, colder than imaginable.  Hunger will settle and take up permanent, painful residence  in your stomach.  The sort of hunger that consumes your every thought and lends to visuals of your body devouring itself.

You will feel fear and terror and exhaustion and despair and anger and sorrow and hope, and that is just in the first few chapters.  But as we join Lamentations (not her original name)  she is beginning her escape in the dark night, wearing stolen boots and gloves and cloak.  She knows she is leaving everything and everyone behind, but she tells herself, "...think not of it, else you shall die of grief."

She prays to god (note the deliberate lack of capitalization) and sings inside herself for some small comfort.  On this journey we learn about our protagonist- that this land is not her birthplace,  that men are worse than wild animals and that this world is savage.  As she flees and reflects, it is revealed that she is resilient,  a smart survivor, a victim of abuse, and a loving caretaker of a special needs child, Bess.

Her perilous trip from Europe to this new uncivilized country is detailed as is the swift and relentless pursuit by a violent, vicious, merciless soldier chosen to hunt her down just for the reward of fresh, hot bread.   The reader will find themselves caring deeply for Lamentations and rooting for her to succeed and live the life she envisions.

Who will enjoy this masterful work of literary fiction?  Anyone who likes a good story with strong characters that elicits deeply felt emotions with an original plot and well woven words. Apologize to the other books in your TBR list and move this one to the top position!  It is going to linger in your consciousness for a long, long time.

Barbara

Surviving the Wild
The girl had no name. She was a teenager, hired to be a caregiver for the child Bess as the family journeyed to America with the ill-fated Jamestown colonists. Could the girl survive the vaster wilds? The colonists were diseased and starving, so immediately following a murder, the girl fled the colony with only a few crude items to keep her alive. However, she had resourcefulness and that proved to be her most valuable possession.

The novel slowly shifted from the girl’s perilous escape to her thoughts and pondering. Her deep thoughts included her past life, her love for the child Bess, religion, selfishness and even death. Lauren Groff has written this novel magnificently as it truly encompasses the wretched lives of the Jamestown colonists, not the sometimes romanticized versions that we conjure after reading a history lesson. It is up to the reader to decide if the girl’s thoughts are merely recollections or possibly hallucinations as she becomes unhealthier.

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Author Information

Lauren Groff Author Biography

Photo: Lucy Schaeffer

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times–bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies' Choice Award, France's Grand Prix de l'Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Author Interview
Link to Lauren Groff's Website

Name Pronunciation
Lauren Groff: "Groff" rhymes with "off."

Other books by Lauren Groff at BookBrowse
  • The Monsters of Templeton jacket
  • Matrix jacket

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