RaveThe Washington PostCook has deepened and expanded on the concerns first aired in her stories, like a fresh mountain stream running inevitably into a deep, cold lake ... It’s hard to read all this during a pandemic of a respiratory illness caused by an airborne virus without feeling an extra chill, but Cook has always excelled at rendering horror plainly, whether that horror is monstrous or merely human. Here, we get both: This manages to be a speculative novel about the future and a well-researched tale about living primitively, arrowheads, hides and all ... funny too, mordantly so ... Cook is a skilled unpeeler of information; revelations and discoveries are timed to perfection. Any time we begin to get complacent in the Wilderness State, Cook remakes the universe, shifting the point of view, the time frame, the physical landscape or the emotional one. It makes a story that might have languished in the valley with its characters move at a brisk pace ... That pace flags only occasionally, usually during descriptions of the landscape, which are frequent enough to become slightly tedious. But in a novel about how humans might survive when stripped of a modernity that’s gone too far, maybe that’s part of the point: Even the most beautiful sunsets and sage fields become boring when they’re all you have ... More than timely, it feels timeless, solid, like a forgotten classic recently resurfaced — a brutal, beguiling fairy tale about humanity.
Hanya Yanagihara
RaveFlavorwireYou must read this book. Go now and buy it and take it with you wherever you\'re going this month. Yes, it\'s long. Yes, it\'s emotionally harrowing (peep the cover, friends). But it\'s also the first book I\'ve come across in some time that made me want to read it under the table at every meal, no matter who I was sitting with. The novel is complex and deeply engrossing, following four friends from their college years through adulthood, with one deep and closely held secret hanging over all of their heads. There\'s also much about families, those you\'re born into and those you construct, which makes it perfect reading for this time of year. As long as your family doesn\'t mind you reading at the table.
