PositiveThe Washington PostGeni brilliantly captures the magnetism of a fanatic whose diagnosis of society’s ills is spot-on but whose conclusions are deranged ... Yet The Wildlands fails to leverage the dramatic heights of its setup, in part because Darlene and Tucker are never allowed to truly clash. The perspectives also deflate the central tension ... Geni has built a small oeuvre around the interface between the natural and human worlds ... Geni is a careful etcher, though there’s something cool and studied about her work that keeps a reader at arm’s length. The human tensions are often weighed down by her meticulous descriptions ... She has a gift for conceiving high-stakes scenarios yet tends to shy away from their dramatic resolutions ... In The Wildlands, Geni invites readers to observe its characters as attentively as a scientist, but ultimately gives too much — and yet not enough — to see.
