The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff - Forthcoming September 2203- 272 Pages

 The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff - Forthcoming September 2203- 272 Pages

The Vaster Wilds is of devastating power about life in America soon after the Jamestown Virginia colony was established. It is set from around 1617 to 1660. It tells of the experiences of a servant girl who escapes the colony into the wilderness.

I found a bit of research on Jamestown helped me 

December 6, 1606 three ships leave England for Virginia- with 107 men. The colony is founded on unoccupied territory with a good harbour 

1619- 90 women and girls are sent as wives and servants

The mythological Disney account of the struggles of the Jamestown colony is part of the hagiographical account of the Origins of America still used by most American history teachers 

As the plot opens a bound servant girl in her teens has just fled from Jamestown, stealing boots from a dead boy killed by smallpox, a knife and a hatchet as well as gloves from her mistress.

"The moon hid itself behind the clouds the wind spat an icy snow at angles. In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming tight for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness. Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright , stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast and low over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight. Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster."

She passes the body of a soldier from the Fort killed by a native. The girl knows someone from the Fort will be hunting her. Her only hope is to run deeper into the vast wilderness. I felt her fear and her growing hungry 

In her thoughts we flash back to her time in England, the terrible crossing. She falls in love aboard ship and loses her virginity. We learn about her mistress and the doomed young girl of whom she cares for.

She has numerous encounters with bears, natives and even a rogue priest.

The Vaster Wilds is a journey into the human cost of the founding of America. It is about profound loneliness and a descent into a near bestiary state.

I was drawn deeply into the story. I cared about the protagonist 

I am currently reading new translations of the Gilgamesh, a 3000 year old epic about a journey through a wilderness full of horror and danger.The Vaster Wilds is part of this ancient tradition 

Lauren Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel MATRIX (September

2021). Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand

Prix de l’Héroïne, was a three time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize,

and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim

Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta’s Best

of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in

Gainesville, Florida. From laureengroff.com

Mel Ulm