RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewA novel of the collective ... These interludes bind the work together, transforming an immersive domestic drama into one that, like much of Erdrich’s oeuvre, speaks to the acrimony at the heart of the American national project.
Lauren Groff
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewGroff’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.
Ashleigh Bell Pedersen
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewPedersen skillfully shifts between these tessellating pieces of family history and unfurls unsettling patterns ... Pedersen does well to temper the accumulative dread with the care and camaraderie of Sunshine’s nearby relatives ... Further generations are described compellingly, and Pedersen slots each into the novel’s familiar mold ... a wonderfully evoked place of rot and ruin ... The brackish setting allows for anger, fear, love and despair to all be felt as one. And the author delicately handles the messy union between human culpability and generational damage. That insatiable crocodile might be made of human cruelty, or abject loneliness, redundancies and foreclosures — or a muddy mess of it all.
