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.
Haunting ... Groff’s fiction is usually identified as ecological and feminist, which it certainly is, but it is theological too ... Her prose, always alive and sensuous, is hit by an extra electrical charge when she exposes characters to the elements ... The narrator makes... quick perspectival shifts...not many, but they add up and give the novel a sense of capaciousness, a wide-angled grandeur ... The suspense comes from not knowing whether she’ll die before she reaches a destination. Then again, death is not death in this novel.
The itinerant story is a challenge of pacing, literally and literarily ... With her new novel, Groff has made that trek more challenging for author and reader ... The clues are tantalizing, but they gather as slowly as moss on a tree. And the answer, when it does finally come, delivers little of the seismic shock generated by the revelations in Groff’s masterpiece, Fates and Furies ... There is constant movement but little momentum, as though the girl were on a woodland treadmill. Our compensation for this stasis is Groff’s lush prose ... Such gorgeous passages in The Vaster Wilds are frequently entrancing, but they can also evoke painting on velvet. Once detected, the performative aroma of this style is hard to shake ... What’s presented here as radical, even heretical for this brave, long-suffering girl is blandly acceptable to contemporary readers of literary fiction.
This book has too little plot — or plenty of it, depending on your perspective. If you believe a novel requires narrative tugs-of-war and dynamic, multicharacter scenes, plentiful pedestrian reads await ... Suspense, at least of the kind expected by an avid reader of similar adventures, is never the point ... She convinces us instead that even the unluckiest among us can find a way to the blessings of peace, quiet and freedom.
What would it be like to run away, without knowing if there were any place to run to? That's the question that seems to impel The Vaster Wilds. With vivid exactitude, Groff dramatizes the answer: The ordeal would be terrifying, raw, brutal and, it must be acknowledged, kind of exhausting in its repetitiveness. Because without a destination in view, all that running starts to seem kind of aimless ... The deliverance offered by The Vaster Wilds may be more realistic than Robinson Crusoe's fortunate flagging down of a passing ship, but perhaps it's not too sentimental to wish that all that running could have ended in something more.
Crystalline portraits ... Groff creates a thrilling journey ... Suspense mounts as Lamentations tries to build a fire or find a dry place to sleep. Some of her memories are horrifically gruesome. A vicious attack is briefly recounted, along with her alleged crime.
Consciously stylized prose—lilting, whispered, full of poetic archaisms ... Revelations prompt Ms. Groff’s most impassioned pronouncements, but it is impossible to fully shake the sense that she is forcing present-day political formulations—about feminism, colonialism and climate change—into the mind of a character from the past. If we think of The Vaster Wilds as a work of mythmaking rather than historical fiction, its mixture of wildness and moralism may be easier to reconcile.
Astoundingly good ... In many ways a rollicking adventure story, quick-paced and snappy and frequently funny. It is also unmistakably a horror story ... The prose is also highly physical. This book is exquisitely attuned to the experience of being a human body within nature ... Stark, vicious, and transcendent, The Vaster Wilds is the best book I’ve read all year. It’s a triumph.
One challenge in these narratives is that the grinding, repetitive business of staying alive can make for grinding, repetitive writing. While The Vaster Wilds never seems in any danger of that, it does – like the frozen landscape the girl is attempting to cross – take a little while to warm up. But once it gets going, it is a swift and well-constructed read ... What lends the story intrigue is its protagonist ... Spellbinding prose ... That’s where this enthralling portrait of America in miniature finds its punch – in the contrast between the insignificant and the grand, between the sweep of history and the smallness of life and survival.
Peril...is no guarantee of tension. The daily business of staying alive...is oddly mundane ... Groff shows an impressive commitment to realism. You sense the reassuring weight of research behind her descriptions of cold, still-alive oysters sliding down the throat and the sound that ice-buckled trees make as they shiver and explode. This might easily have resulted in a seriously boring book but it doesn’t. Groff is too nimble for that. With calm and surgical prose she glides towards the horror that lurks on the far side of desperation ... I like Groff because she doesn’t care about being cool. Her writing has a timeless quality.
A novel of sin and deliverance, monstrosity and awe, and the dark rapacity of the American soul ... In invoking that elemental story – the girl, the forest – Groff’s novel also invites allegorical wandering. There’s an Anthropocene parable of stewardship here; a pandemic-era fable of contagion; and a tale of ordinary female terror ... Could be seen as a mighty repudiation of faith – a God-killing fever dream – but also as a divine exaltation. The rhythm of Groff’s prose is certainly biblical, incantatory ... It’s a hymn of endurance, and it takes some enduring. There is something exhilarating about this novel, a velocity of ambition. But the Florida-based author has previously insulated her work with a protective layer of humour: that was part of the delectable lure of Fates and Furies. Now the insulation is gone; in its place is a new austerity, a whittled seriousness. The Vaster Wilds is a lean and hungry book, bare as a gnawed bone, resolute. Groff is not lost in the forest. She knows exactly where she is going.
The greatest difficulty with The Vaster Wilds is that, in its concentration on the practical mechanics of survival, it can become achingly repetitive ... As a study of the human capacity to endure solitude and hardship, it offers insight, but it’s hard to escape a sense of being underwhelmed by the novel’s climax.
The Native Americans with whom the girl crosses paths are kept at a distance, though, meaning that post-colonial reflections...feel shoehorned in. Similarly, the musings on women sound more #MeToo than 17th-century ... From a sentence-level stylist such as Groff, the syntactical shenanigans grate ... The girl’s solitude keeps the stakes low. In the absence of characters invested in her fate, survival for its own sake is not enough.
Groff’s fugitive has a preternatural – some would say ludicrous – aptitude for survival ... It’s a hymn of endurance, and it takes some enduring. There is something exhilarating about this novel, a velocity of ambition. But the Florida-based author has previously insulated her work with a protective layer of humour ... Now the insulation is gone; in its place is a new austerity, a whittled seriousness.
Vivid, feminist ... Propelled by the girl’s struggle to survive, but also by her interiority and what her memories reveal about her previous life in London ... A layered, dense novel, one that can be read as an allegory about the follies of the American experiment and humans’ planetary depredations. While it’s often a dark story with only slivers of hope, Groff’s inimitable style and language makes it a memorable, immersive reading experience.
The riveting The Vaster Wilds, combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep as it chronicles a runaway servant's struggle to endure a bitter colonial winter ... The existential threat to women makes it a potent, timely fable as much as a historical novel
Captivating ... Groff’s seemingly joyfully related, seamless period prose; and the time-collapsing sense of reading a text channeled directly from the mind of a long-ago-living, breathing woman facing extraordinary circumstances.
[A] historical fever dream ... What plot there is centers on learning the reason for her flight and how it will end, but the book must be read primarily for its sentences and the light it shines on the place of humans in the order of the world ... The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.
Extraordinary ... Groff builds and maintains suspense on multiple levels, while offering an unflinching portrayal of her heroine’s desperation and will to survive. This is a triumph.
