Stunningly written. I really too my time with this one. Not a book to be raced through. Highly intelligent and epic

Thank you NetGalley for this advanced copy.

I really enjoyed this story, I found it immersive and read it in two sittings. Lovely storytelling.

I enjoyed the book and found it very well written, especially the girl. I liked the way we slowly learn about her background, as she stifled to survive.

The Vaster Wilds is a story of trying to survive against impossible odds.

An English girl escapes a fort in a vast and wild America that is just starting to be colonised by Europeans. She runs through the cold forest and wilderness, encountering all the dangers of a foreign country where she doesn't know the rules. As she runs, we discover about her previous life and the circumstances which led to her flight.

I couldn't help but think about how I would fare in a similar circumstance. The girl has such strength and determination to overcome obstacles, I'm not sure I would have made it as far as she did.

A recommended read for lovers of beautiful prose.

There were parts to this I really liked. The tale of survival and endurance against all odds was really inspiring and thrilling to read.
The repetition throughout the book started to grate on me. There was a lot of talk about how freezing and starving she was, which was important to note, but really took me out of the story due to how often it was mentioned.

This seems to be a bit of a Marmite book, but I absolutely loved it. (Just as I do Marmite). I found the narrative compelling and immersive and was carried along with it almost at one sitting. Adventure story, fable, survival story, historical tale – so many things –all cleverly integrated into a fever dream of a plot. Although there isn’t really a plot, but a bleak and grim story of a young girl who flees her community. Set in 1600s America, a teenage servant girl escapes from starvation and disease in an English settlement, inspired by Jamestown. Her whole life has been one of hardship and when the settlement starts to disintegrate she escapes into the wilderness in a desperate attempt to find safety in a world beyond anything she could imagine. It’s a tough read, visceral in its detail and certainly not for the faint-hearted. The somewhat stylised writing won’t appeal to everyone but I found it mesmerizing.

A servant girl escapes into the wilderness from acolonial American for. The fort inhabitants had been sick and starving for months, and all we know about the girl's reasons for escape are slowly revealed by author Lauren Groff over the course of the novel, but from the outset we know violence lies behind her.

We never find out her name, and even she refers to herself only as "Girl". She's had a harsh life, and has been used by her employer, and came unwillingly to the fort after a dreadful journey across the ocean. She's only known city life, so her prospects for survival in the woods is grim, even with the few items she grabbed before running: blankets, a knife, flint, axe and cup.

At first, all she does is run, certain of pursuit, and search for food. All the while, she remembers her life, and soon the story transforms into a meditation on
-the reality of what colonization was to people without an adequate understanding of what the landscape and its original inhabitants were really like, and the fear they responded with
-the cruelties dealt by employers on their servants, and
-the role of women in society.

The writing is wonderful — it's Lauren Groff! — and we travel with the girl through increasingly harsh circumstances (she's starving, and injured). The writing is visceral as the girl suffers terribly while on the run, but also in the glimpses we see of her childhood in her employer's home, then at the fort in a different country. There is so much hardship within this fairly short novel, but it's impossible not to be impressed with how long and far the girl travels with minimal supplies and knowledge, and how complex a story Groff tells.

The ending is tragic in one sense, but at the same time it's oddly poetic.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Random House UK, Cornerstone for this ARC in exchange for my review.

I thought I was going to love this book, but it just wasn't for me. However, I will say I was quite impressed by Lauren Groff's writing and I will be going back to read her other books.

The Vaster Wilds is set in early colonial America, in the Jamestown colony, Virginia. It's the tale of a servant girl who is running away from the settlement into the wilderness and all she has to go through to survive. Groff's writing style is very atmospheric, it really pulls you in and that, coupled with the motifs of The Vaster Wilds, made for a very raw and visceral read.

The reason this book wasn't to my liking was probably because of the topic of survival, which is not my favourite, but since the whole reason I requested this ARC in the first place was the author and not so much this specific book, I'd say I'm happy I got to read a book by Groff and I do want to give another one a try. My personal opinion aside, I'd say this is a very well-written tale of survival with barely any dialogue or plot, as it's conventionally understood anyway, and it works beautifully for this book.

Thank you very much to Hutchinson Heinemann/Cornerstone/Random House UK for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I love Lauren Groff's work, and this was no exception. The Vaster Wilds is a realistic, dramatic, vivid, sometimes unnerving tale of one girl's struggle to survive in the most inhospitable circumstances. Living on her wits, trying to navigate the icy wilderness, whilst pursued by evil, I was hooked from page one. Brilliant!

"It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world, said the voice in her mind. Yes, she said aloud, for now she did see the sin in full."

A girl is fleeing through the woods, having committed a crime, one initially unnamed, at an English settlement in North America somewhere in the 17th century. She has little with her – the settlers are starving, having arrived in the New World with its promise of abundance, to a famine. The girl knows she'll be followed so that she can be punished and so, she alternates between running and hiding her frozen and hungry body.

As she makes her escape across the vast wilderness, the story of her life unfolds. Her given name is Lamentations, awarded to her after her mother, presumed a sex worker, left her on a street as a newborn. Her first years are spent in a poorhouse before, aged four, a wealthy woman employs her, first, to keep her bed warm (literally), later, to look after the woman's daughter, who has some kind of disability that keeps her mind childlike even as she grows. The girl loves this child with her all, which is what eventually leads to the 'sin' that she flees from.

The girl (I can't bear to call her by her given name seeing as she hated it) is aware of the native people in the landscape. Initially, she views them as the savages her countrymen have made them out to be, but as her freedom looms, she begins to question the English desire to colonise. She has conversations with god during her passage, though her faith begins to waiver as she struggles to survive, desperate to make it to a French settlement in the North where she might be safe.

Over the course of her journey, the girl makes profound observations, about nature, the fragility of life, and the human spirit. One night, she observes a bear sitting in a river at night, looking out at a cascading waterfall with what appears to be wonder. The girl muses whether this would mean the bear had a soul, and that if it did, humans did not have the right to slay animals the way they do, did not have the right to conquer lands and subjugate them and their people.

This book reminded me partly of 'The Revenant', in the way the stubborn girl by sheer force of will continued on despite setback after setback. At the same time, it's much more philosophical and moving than that. The girl realises how infinitesimal she is: "the loss of a star dims not the splendor of the constellations" and "to be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive", her inner voices tell her.

The writing is as gorgeous and brutal as the land the girl tries to survive. The author does not romanticise the character's suffering but, nevertheless, gives it meaning. I find it hard to put into words how this book has made me feel. At times, I felt like I was far removed from it, at others, I was embroiled in the story but throughout it, I was impossibly gripped.

I haven't read anything like this in some time.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I inhaled this novel in one day while I was ill, which is testament to the strong narrative and evocative prose that kept me hooked even through brain fog! The way the story unfolded was very clever and Groff gives you just enough to understand what's happening while also leaving things mysterious and to your own imagination. The book has a powerful message about colonialism and how humans change the natural world, which is an important message for us all to hear right now. I'd be surprised if this isn't nominated for awards over the next year.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth a group of people travel across the ocean to settle in the New World. Ravaged by hunger and disease, they cannot get help from the local people who they have alienated . As the settlement descends into cannibalism a girl escapes. She is a mere servant, someone shunned for her skin colour and treated badly, but she has values and thinks to find other settlements which are more successful. The fates have other ideas and the girl is forced to scratch out an existence on her own.
Having really enjoyed the last novel I was looking forward to reading this and I was not disappointed. There is a wonderfully lyrical way to the narrative which echoes the wild landscape and tells a tale of life on the edge in the early days of European settlement. This is a terrific read.

Lauren Groff can write excellent novels even if this one is not my favorite. An allegorical story with a pinch of fantasy and a lot of layers.
I liked it but didn't loved it, somehow I couldn't care for the MC.
It's a good novel and I'm sure a lot of people will love it
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Book Review...

'The Vaster Wilds' by Lauren Groff

In this book we follow an unnamed servant girl as she flees famine and disease in a colonial settlement in the early 1600s.

The writing in this book is wonderful and demands to be read slowly and savoured. The land Groff describes is beautiful but unforgiving and she brings it to life with incredible clarity. Our heroines journey is fraught with danger and her isolation and desperation radiate from the pages. On the whole it is a bleak and relentless story but our girls determination made me hopeful and had me rooting for her all the way.

Having struggled with Groff’s last book, Matrix, I hesitated about reading this. However, I should have started it sooner, as it is in another league. Ostensibly the story of a young girl’s escape from a town riddled with plague, finding herself navigating blindly through the wilderness, this is so much more. It is a story about faith, about naming, about survival, about finding your strengths and accepting your limitations. It is about pursuit, rest, solitude, loss and happiness. It is about domination, about the brevity of the human existence and the unending cycles of nature. It is, as all historical fiction, a novel about now.

It is a multi-focal narrative, with shifts in perspective and time, which Groff handles expertly (something I felt was missing in Matrix). I thoroughly enjoyed this and will be recommending it to everyone I can! My only question is why did I wait so long to read it??

This was a fairly bleak and desolate read. The Vaster Wilds are the the wilds of North America, populated by few westerners and some indigenous people. The main character is a young maid who is running away from the fortified village after an atrocity. She has played some part in that and what this was is slowly revealed but the main point is her survival in the winter in these bleak lands. It is amazingly written and captures that sparsely inhabited landscape. A tough subject beautifully described

This is historical fiction with a touch of the fantastical, a dollop of spiritual, and a massive schmeer of the allegorical. A solid corrective to white America's founding myths, The Vaster Wilds is a survival horror in the rawest sense - our protagonist is a dark-skinned servant in a British colony who escapes the starvation leading the town into madness and cannibalism (this part is based on true records). As a low status servant she is certain she will be high on the menu, plus the threat of rape and other horrors has held over her all of her life. She escapes into the wild with some smallpoxed boots and a cloak and her wits, where she tries to survive, whilst being persued by a man for the temerity of her trying to exercise free will.

Groff's novel does have a propelling if grim, narrative at its heart. But it is a little more interested in the bigger picture, of the brutality of man, the place of women compared with a different kind of brutality in nature. Spirits or old gods seem to be watching over our lead, as sparks occasionally coalesce into a fire and wild beasts are turned away. But these brief moments of intervention may not be enough, and as we explore her past, it becomes apparent that even with the fear that subsumes her life on the run, it is at least the closest she has come to freedom.

This is lit-fic through a prism, but as feminist fiction it works pretty well, and certainly takes little time in making its point both about the gender roles in pioneer USA, but how race and ethnicity also plays a part (Native Americans also skirt this story but are not the focus). A version of the Fugitive in miniature, the ending has an inevitability about it whilst feeling right, and is not without resonance. Perhaps it goes too big in places with the allegory, and there are few surprises once the plot is in motion, but its still a biting short novel that gets in and out and makes a powerful point.

2,5
This historical survival novel is well written, with beautiful descriptions of nature that make the story come alive. But there’s not much happening and I found parts unbelievable. The girl finds food, water and shelter rather easily and seems to know how to survive when she has never really been out of the city. I’m afraid this didn’t convince me.
Thank you Penguin and Netgalley for the ARC.

A stunning book. I read it in two sittings, gripped from the very first page. A young girl, employed by a minister and his family who have recently arrived in America as part of an early wave of immigrants, escapes from the confines of the fort where they are living and embarks on the most hazardous of journeys into the unknown. As she runs from her pursuers, we gradually learn about her as she remembers her early life and experiences while she negotiates a path through the wilderness. Her courage and her competence in developing survival skills are astonishing but entirely credible. The writing is so good that her pain and exhaustion are palpable to the reader, as is her delight in the landscape and environment she travels through. Highly recommended.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

This is a brutal but beautiful book that forces us to rethink the great American novel. Following the not-true-story-but-good-be-true-story of one girl's search for meaning in the vast American wilds.