A review by knkoch
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

adventurous emotional mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I found this to be a moving, breathtaking portrait of a mind transcendent over hardship and circumstance. It’s really complete, astounding in its succinct account of, I suppose, a flight. It’s another perfect book to read knowing nothing. This story reminded me so strongly of many of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, where he very gently drops you into a life and lets you feel your way into the details as the characters move. It’s an expert touch to pull that off smoothly; I’ve read so many other books that can’t.

There are a lot of other wonderful things. Lauren Groff does so well at using historical or antiquated language naturally in her prose, and it helped me inhabit this character’s worldview, substantially different from my own. I found this less dense than Matrix, and a little more memorable in its more straightforward, pared-down narrative. I guess I’ll just need to read Groff’s whole catalog now. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal death, Death, Violence, Xenophobia, Excrement, Cannibalism, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Child death, Rape, Sexual content, Murder, and Pandemic/Epidemic

It’s a bleak world… if you’re concerned, read the blurb/description of the time period this is set in. Pretty much what you can imagine happening in early Jamestown happens. There’s no taggable CW for starvation, but I’d mark that, too.