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Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it. Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they slowly and painfully learn to survive in an unpredictable, dangerous land, bickering and battling for power and control as they betray and save one another. But as Agnes embraces the wild freedom of this new existence, Bea realizes that saving her daughter's life means losing her in a different way. The farther they get from civilization, the more their bond is tested in astonishing and heartbreaking ways.… (more)
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I really enjoyed this book and it's quite a wrench coming away from it and back to real life. I was listening to the audio version, narrated by Stacey Glemboski, who did a fabulous job.
Life in The City has become a struggle; the pollution and lack of medical care is causing
It's a tough life and a sharp learning curve. They have to keep moving, making zero impact on the land and carrying all their rubbish with them until they can dispose of it at a check-in point.
I thought the author managed to strike the perfect balance between descriptions of the survival life and the interactions between the members of the group. I loved how Agnes grew up with such a profound understanding of her surroundings and became better than many of the adults at tracking and responding to the behaviour of the animals around her. I also noticed a very brief mention of a shortage of sand for building in the city, something that seems to be making scary news recently.
I have just today heard that this book has made it to the finals of this year's Booker prize and I'm kind of surprised, as I don't normally enjoy the Booker nominations, especially the finals list. Of course, I'm now rooting for it to win.
Highly recommended, especially in audio.
Climate change fiction has become a staple of late, and this one is a prime example. A very intriguing idea, and the author has done her research but despite landing a coveted Booker Shortlist spot, I found the book lacking, in depth and soul. Not a bad read by any means, but it never really took off, the way I expected. I much preferred Migrations which also dealt with climate calamities.
Reading closely, Diane Cook has written a deeply complex story about motherhood, longing, coming of age, government failures & flawed 'best intentions', and the climate. It reinforces the feeling of detachment and confusion created by governmental oversight that at the end of things does not seem to really care about anything but keeping government itself running. It really is a story about trust and abandonment. What it means to trust to loose it and what it means to walk away and sometimes come back, rebound, and then leave again. Like the seasons themselves that are warping and changing in response to climate change the story central themes are this ebb and flow of power and trust.
The story is beautifully told and the characters reinforce the climate change angle. Which is to say all fiction is now science fiction but the other way around: all fiction is now climate fiction. It just is the backdrop of life and so it plays a central role in the story but Diane Cook writes about it in a natural way that puts the characters up front. Highly recommend.
Looking at reviews, I love how incredibly divisive this book is among readers--we either loved it or hated it, not a whole lot in
It was haunting and, at times, punishing, but no where nearly as brutal as The Road, which is where my comparison-making brain kept wandering, and that is how this book really shimmers. I love how it examined the mother-daughter relationship.
I think I'll be thinking about it for a long time.
The backstory and world building here are fairly loosely sketched--I would have been interested to know more, but the approach prevents any real holes or nitpicking and keeps the focus firmly on the group's progress through the wilderness. Although quite a bit happens, it's very focused on the characters and the group dynamics, as well as the family relationship between Bea, Agnes, and Bea's husband Glen. The author did a lot of research on survival in the American West and it shows; the details are believable. It's an interesting mix of typical dystopian fiction and the group-survival genre (I got a bit of a Walking Dead vibe, though it's not very similar in any other way).
This is a book I went into with very little expectation, which is probably why I liked it so much. The
The story takes place in a world where not much of nature remains, so a selected few have been sent to the last remaining wilderness to see if it's possible for people to co-exist with nature without ruining it.
Above all else though, this is a book about mothers and daughters and how we tend to appreciate the choices of our mothers only in hindsight. It was also done in a way that didn't feel exaggerated or explained to death.
The New Wilderness is an attempt at a dark dystopia where there is the overpopulated, polluted City and the last of the wilderness called The Wilderness State. The story is centred around a mother and her daughter who volunteer to go to The Wilderness as a part of the
Let me just start with the fact that I gave this novel a chance even though there are huge gaps in the entire setup. This City and The Wilderness really don't make much sense. The world-building is lacking at best.
Once you accept that, it is logical to assume that the value of this Booker 2020 Shortlisted book is going to come from a solid plot and complex characters and relationships.
Sigh.
I kept reading thinking I was missing out on something. Obviously, the characters undergo a transformation by changing their way of life. But it is all somewhat - superficial? Without solid worldbuilding, it is difficult to buy into the workings of the society and the political moves of the characters throughout the story.
There were a few moments of mother-daughter tension when I thought the magic was finally going to start happening. It never did.
The writing is good, but not great. The best were the descriptions of nature and the gripping prologue.
However, without a decent plot and with mediocre characters this book felt hollow. One of the biggest disappointments of 2020. How this ended up on the Booker shortlist is beyond me.