The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

This is not a book you would want to read if you were feeling low and looking for something to lift your spirits. It's a bit like reading the Book of Job from the Bible as the trials and tribulations that beset the young girl in the story are harsh and unrelenting.

It is set in the time when the earliest settlers were making their way across the Atlantic to America, and the girl in the story is an abandoned Dutch orphan who had been sent to a minister's family to work as a servant when she was still only four years old. After a few years of working in the household, the girl is told by her mistress that the family would be closing up the house and sailing to America and they would be taking her with them. It was a dreadful journey where the ship was almost lost in a storm and when they arrived at their destination the Dutch settlers were already starving and unhappy to have more mouths to feed.

I won't give away the circumstances, but after a while in the new land, the girl is forced to flee for her life and the only option open to her was to try and get through the dense forrest and find a river to lead her to a French settlement further north. She has not been able to take much with her, but she has a knife and a pewter mug, and she has dressed in all the clothes she could find to guard against the terrible cold. A soldier is sent after her, but she manages to evade capture, although now the winter is closing in and she has to forrage for what little food she can find in the snow.

The girl is quite resourceful and manages to keep herself alive, but there are many occassions where she could easily have died alone or been eaten by bears. Everything she has to deal with ends up making her life worse and it isn't long before she is badly injured and starving. This misery continues for the remainder of the book and apparently it tells the story of America in miniature but I confess I wouldn't have seen that for myself.

It's interesting, well written, and is the sort of book that will probably win a prize some day, but you have to be feeling quite positive about life as you start to read it because your mood is only going to go down from there.

Comments

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