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.
A fully-realized historical milieu ... Groff acknowledges her character’s troubled past without turning pain into spectacle ... Her surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page ... A terrific addition to a developing canon of our continued existence.
Groff’s novels often account for a character’s entire life, propelling the reader through a cascade of keenly articulated, outward-facing presents, rather than cogitations on the past. The Vaster Wilds is much narrower in time frame, taking place over just a few weeks, and more urgent in its objectives ... A rather lonely novel, yet one shot through with Groff’s perennial interest in the pioneering spirit ... A testament to individual struggle ... The girl embodies a furious onward motion, as does the prose. Sentence after sentence, Groff creates luminous, sparely rendered images, the historical setting allowing her to play with cadence and grammar ... Some of the best fiction is capacious rather than penetrative, rounded rather than aculeate, holding the abundance of a vessel rather than the violence of, say, a spear. This is the radical vision of The Vaster Wilds.
