Thank you NetGalley for approving me to read this. A very good read that had me hooked, once started I couldn’t put it down. Highly recommend

I don't often get overcome by books, but by the end of this one, I was nearly there.

The first 20-30 pages here felt like hard work. It's full of Jacobean turns of phrase and dense prose that you can barely skim the surface of. Then the thaw came and I found myself unexpectedly sucked into this short novel. I needed to know whether the resilient and ingenuous servant girl survived - whether she even could survive - the entirely natural wilderness.

There are some clever themes running through here too, that aren't too heavy-handed. Yes, there's the colonial expansion, the filth and squalor of the fort and the not-too-contrasting memories of London. The barbarity of the girl's treatment as a servant compared with the impartial indifference of nature to her survival. The need to coexist peacefully with the land (the girl's own starvation makes her as monstrous to the nature around her as the settlement on the river).

And then there's the religion. The girl has faith, has been dazzled by her faith before. And to survive she will need both wits and faith. She is both overwhelmed and despairing of the beauty around her - it is both full of her god and completely empty of it. And does that mean that she is too?

And the ending is so beautiful and tragic and pointless and meet. We are all the ant.

I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

A servant girl flees colonial Jamestown, leaving behind starvation, hardship and something even worse. She has to survive in the wilderness with only her wits and a few possessions.

This book was breathtaking - the whole story is told through the thoughts of a servant girl (in the 3rd person). Yet it doesn’t, at any point, become boring. There’s so much going on: her escape, her methods of survival, the people and animals she nearly meets along the way, the landscape and its contrast to the squalor of “civilised” life left behind in Jamestown. You can feel her desperation to get away, he wonder at what she sees and her drive to survive.

Honestly, I can’t recommend it enough.

Do not read this if you are depressed.

This story takes you on a depressing ride of one girls life.

It takes you from her escaping slavery to attempting to survive living a life in the wilds.

Unfortunately the story was far to descriptive from bodily functions to infected sores.

It was just too much.

I found this difficult to get into initially, but once I did I enjoyed it a lot. The prose was beautiful, it was pacy and gripping. The secondary characters fell a little flat at times, and I could have perhaps used a little more backstory to flesh out the main character, but overall a compelling read.

Yes, beautiful, unselfconscious writing .. persuasive voice of young woman fleeing, fighting nature this time for survival after rape and domestic abuse in an impossibly poverty-ridden background and sub-cultural surrounding. I was gripped but when I began to realise depth of unrelenting grimness, I had to stop .. but I can see her great skill, for sure.

I received an ARC of this book via netgalley. Unfortunately it is one of those books that makes me wonder whether the author or publisher had been on mind altering substances. it was very difficult to follow, alternating between the MC's escape and her ? dreams. I could not decide what.To be fair in the end I could not care what. There was no clear path through the narative and frankly It did not gain my interest

The Vaster Wilds is the nature imagery book Where the Crawdads Sing wishes it could be.

Lauren Groff is an auto-buy author for me now. I started with Fates and Furies and The Monsters of Templeton, and I have been solidified into a diehard fan through Matrix, which is why I have been salivating over this advanced reader copy of The Vaster Wilds. I made the right choice. Groff’s writing is flowing, beautiful, and easy to read.

The Vaster Wilds is the nature imagery book Where the Crawdads Sing wishes it could be. It is also the thriller Crawdads wishes it could be. Groff has managed to marry a psychological thriller storyline with a survival narrative artfully. This narrative differs from other survival narratives I have read and which did not resonate with me (this is Hatchet side-eye) and I felt invested in the main character’s arc and her fight for survival on multiple fronts.

This book contains some heavy subjects, including domestic abuse and sexual assault. We meet the main character (she is technically nameless – a part of the story I also found fascinating) in the wild and on the run in 1600s colonial North America and slowly disentangle her backstory while she faces new challenges in the form the trying to track her down and overcoming injuries and finding food. Thematically this narrative is about human resilience and varying ways people respond to sexual violence.

The Vaster Wilds is very dark and depressing, so tread carefully, but “creepy early modern” is one of my favorite categories of book. If you liked the character-driven narrative of Matrix or the psychological twists of Fates and Furies, then you will like this book as well, as long as you are prepared to face some very dark and creepy crevices of human nature.

Completely captivating and engrossing, this novel isn’t what I would usually go for but I didn’t regret reading it. I was totally transported. Gripping

A beautifully written, poignant novel. A servant girl escapes and tries to survive in the forest and evade capture. A modern classic, incredibly descriptive and yet easy to read.

My thanks to Random House U.K. Cornerstone Hutchinson Heinemann for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Vaster Wilds’ by Lauren Groff.

This is a work of literary historical fiction that focuses upon the flight of a teenage servant girl from the Jamestown settlement in the early 17th Century. Groff gives a few clues about what caused the girl to leave along with a highly detailed account of her struggle to survive alone in the wilderness.

This was a very raw novel in terms of how the journey through the wilderness was depicted. How the girl, referred to as Zed by the family she had worked for, coped with starvation, illness, and the cold along with attendant bodily responses. Add to this the threats from various wild animals, the indigenous peoples, and a tracker sent to find her.

Groff’s writing was lyrical throughout, powerful and poetic. Yet while I appreciated the beauty of the writing and especially the rich depictions of nature, I found it difficult to connect to the character and plot.

Overall, I felt that ‘The Vaster Wilds’ was a bit too raw and I never settled to it.

2.5 stars rounded up to 3.

I don't know what to think of Lauren Groff. I DNF'ed Fates and Furies yet still recommend it to people (did I get bored with it too early?). I haven't read Matrix but it sounds fascinating. I admire Groff's work ethic. I sure wish I could read 300 books a year, while my husband managed properties for Florida university students (yes, this is a little bitchy of me... Soz!!).

So how did I find this? I sometimes felt a little bored, mainly because at times it felt self consciously over written and also the main character was Very Good and other people (the mistress, the minister, the eldest son) were Very Bad. Some more dimensionality would have been appreciated. Also some parts read as very 21st century (particularly her death bed realisation that her smallpox infection would have killed the local indigenous population - come on!!!! This did not seem realistic to me but maybe I am wrong and theories of infection would have been known among illiterate servants of the Jamestown era??). I also thought the cannibalism, eat the baby scene portrayed as HORRIFYINGLY EVIL was also too moralistically simplustic. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it... She should have eaten some of the baby, and THEN run away. I would have liked her to be more of a morally grey character overall. As stated earlier, at times she read too much like a mouthpiece for 21st century ideas. I also saw no point whatsoever to her killing the minister (I guess to make that guy chase her, but then he died, like, immediately).

What made this book VERY impressive to me was the Last Temptation of Christ-esque ending - the fact that she dies. This was amazing!!

I also have to admit that writing in this style was very impressive. No way could I do this!! Would Chat GPT be as good? Let's not go there...

I also really liked the use of the 3rd person and when we went into other perspectives, particularly the indigenous locals.

And I liked her glimpses of happiness with the Dutch guy on the boat - amazing that her life wasn't completely shit all the time. Also nicely foreshadows TLTOC-esque ending.

Anyway a solid 3 1/2 stars. Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC

I received an advanced reading copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Random House UK, Cornerstone, and the author Lauren Groff.
I have mixed feelings about this one! While incredibly vivid and very involving at times, it wasn't particularly gripping or un-put-downable, as beyond Zed managing her survival in the wild, not much else happened!
However I can absolutely appreciate the captivating and lyrical writing, but it would have been nice to have a few more flashbacks to life before her escape to liven things up a bit! 3.5 stars.

I was a little unsure going into The Vaster Wilds as it doesn't fall within my usual type of reads but Lauren Groff has an excellent way of crafting a world and drawing you into it. This is a simple, timeless story that could be picked up again and again.

Groff weaves together a tale of resilience, the natural environment and a clash of culture in a riveting survival story of a young servant girl who runs away from her colonial settlement.

While this is not my usual read, I gravitated towards this because of the praise that Matrix, Groff's previous novel, received.

I appreciated:
· The beautiful description of nature that is depicted throughout
· The journey our spunky heroine goes on as she wills herself to survive the wilderness through which she is traveling
· The concepts of 1) god and 2) humans thriving together that Groff explores
· A female lead in an adventure novel!

Lauren Groff's writing is - again - impeccable. With this new novel it took me quite a while to get into it, to understand its undercurrents, get a feel for the main character and its idiosyncrasies. Once I did I was very much captured by it, as with "Matrix" before. I find it very impressive, how Lauren Groff manages to create such distinct works that feel like they are made from the same material, but are still so very different experiences.
Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for providung a review copy.

Vaster Wilds takes you into the depths of winter in one of the earliest English settlements in America. A young woman is fleeing across the frozen landscape. Slowly we learn why she running.

A good atmospheric read that had me on the edge of my seat when reading. I would recommend for fans of Lauren Groff.

There are just too many barriers erected by Lauren Groff in 'The Vaster Wilds' between her narrative & plot and her reader. I'm sad to have to join the ranks of other reviews who found this novel tiresome and frustrating.

I wanted to give Groff another go, because I felt the same way about 'Matrix' as I do now about 'The Vaster Wilds', asking myself why Groff distances herself so much from her readership. Her grammar, the absence of tension or drive in the narrative, the repetitiveness, the unrelenting descriptiveness; I couldn't find a hook to snag my interest.

One of my biggest niggles with this novel is that Barbara Newhall Follett did it better in 'The House Without Windows'. There is such a resemblance to Eepersip's story that I couldn't help but be disappointed in this.

Another absolutely extraordinary novel from this writer who apparently can do no wrong. Once again, this new book is a complete shift in subject and content from Groff’s previous works: here we find ourselves in early colonial America, swooping down to follow in the frantic footsteps of a young servant on the run, escaping a tiny settlement into the bleak, unrelentingly harsh wilderness of what will become Virginia.

As we run alongside her, pieces of the story begin to fall into place. She is starving: it has been four days since she’s eaten. She has stolen her boots from a boy who died from smallpox the night before, and had no more need of them. We don’t yet know what she’s running from, only that she cannot go back. She has a few snatched possessions under her cloak: this escape was not planned, or at least was not planned well, but nevertheless she is here, and is desperate to keep going. She runs toward the North, toward the living, and battles the voices in her head which doubt her ability to make it. What does it mean to survive? What does it take to adapt?

You will find yourself holding your breath as she takes risks, sometimes calculated ones, sometimes immediate decisions in the flash of a moment: every second is visceral, heart-in-mouth stuff of nightmares. Her need for food forces her to hunt, clumsily at first, then more confidently as she adjusts to her new reality. “If I stop, I will die,” is the mantra she repeats to herself as she moves through the wilderness, determined to live, to matter.

As the girl travels toward an unknowable destination, completely by herself for the first time in her life, she debates with her own mind about God, the role of women, the worth of an individual who’s been cast out by almost everyone. She recalls her earlier life across the seas, and the hellscape of the starving town she’s escaped. She passes close to the native Americans who glide like shadows through the dense woodland, perfectly adapted to life in this environment, always silently watching, always aware of the girl’s whereabouts, completely unknown to her. In a more romantic book they would scoop her up and welcome the starving girl into their society: this is not that novel. Groff’s writing does not let up: we are hit with wave after wave of unrelenting descriptions of her pain, of the girl’s wrenched and raw flesh, her distended starving belly, her blessed relief at finding food – all set against her mental interior and the searing sense of injustice, of loss, that powers her on. This is perfect fodder for anyone transfixed by the survival series Alone, or those of us who simply immediately read anything Groff puts her name to. A truly unforgettable tale that will haunt you long into the winter months, and make you pause, grateful, before stepping out into the cold.

Review in the October issue of Cambridge Edition magazine - print and online