Expansive and intimate ... This is not your generic book club selection, celebrating four friends living, laughing, loving. But if you want a ruminating, clear-eyed look at friendship as a means of survival, this is it ... The rigorous work of authentic friendship asks us if we’re doing all we can for ourselves and the world we live in. Flournoy holds this mirror up to her characters and shows how modern life distorts those images despite everybody’s best intentions ... Galvanizing and sustaining.
Astonishing ... Flournoy has written a book that attests to the phenomenology and psycho-geography of haunting — the ways a person’s mind can become a haunted house ... In Flournoy’s hands...burgeoning self-knowledge feels both political and exquisitely personal ... Flournoy’s account of the emotional vicissitudes of friendship and its endurance evokes the hushed, disconsolate quality of [Toni] Morrison.
A loose arrangement of vignettes ... Some of the chapters have the scope and roundedness of good short stories ... But most are brief and inconclusive, more like snippet glimpses of the women’s frustrations in love, work and politics. The random skips in time impose an irksome stop-start rhythm on the scenes that enhances the general sensation of stasis. A story twist near the conclusion is meant to be cathartic but feels tacked on.
Incisive, idealistic ... Each of the women’s points of view felt distinct, though the amount of time with each character across the book’s four parts was uneven. At times the novel felt more like a collection of short stories than one cohesive narrative — until the second half of the book, when two events, one celebratory and one heartbreaking, bring the group together.
Angela Flournoy’s vivid second novel, The Wilderness, treats friendship with the dignity and fascination it deserves ... Some of the women are closer than others, a discrepancy they manage to endure, as the four share love in all its contradictions and complexities, its capacity to be both uneven and steadfast ... Flournoy’s descriptions of Los Angeles in particular are incandescent — blending odes to its beauty with fears for its future.
lournoy juggles the character development well, creating relatably flawed women. She also expertly conveys the power of lifelong friendships that can feel closer even than familial bonds. Their friendship comforts and fortifies the women as they navigate the perilous, thorny, messy wilderness of modern adulthood.
We have a glimpse of a group that feels genuine: born of off-screen relationships, inflected with politics without falling into formality or righteous monologue ... There are certain templates for the novel of female friendship, and with The Wilderness, Flournoy has broken with them ... Flournoy’s kaleidoscopic view feels true to our times ... Flournoy demonstrates a keen awareness of how class and career shape friendships ... A somber yet emotional arc ... Flournoy’s depiction of resistance from within the city’s encampments and the immigrant community feels prophetic ... [There is] a problem with the elliptical narration ... Flournoy manages to specifically highlight Black experiences while also expressing the universality of those experiences.
