The Vaster Wilds Review

The Vaster Wilds is the nature imagery book Where the Crawdads Sing wishes it could be.

Lauren Groff is an auto-buy author for me now. I started with Fates and Furies and The Monsters of Templeton, and I have been solidified into a diehard fan through Matrix, which is why I have been salivating over this advanced reader copy of The Vaster Wilds. I made the right choice. Groff’s writing is flowing, beautiful, and easy to read.

The Vaster Wilds is the nature imagery book Where the Crawdads Sing wishes it could be. It is also the thriller Crawdads wishes it could be. Groff has managed to marry a psychological thriller storyline with a survival narrative artfully. This narrative differs from other survival narratives I have read and which did not resonate with me (this is Hatchet side-eye) and I felt invested in the main character’s arc and her fight for survival on multiple fronts.

This book contains some heavy subjects, including domestic abuse and sexual assault. We meet the main character (she is technically nameless — a part of the story I also found fascinating) in the wild and on the run in 1600s colonial North America and slowly disentangle her backstory while she faces new challenges in the form the trying to track her down and overcoming injuries and finding food. Thematically this narrative is about human resilience and varying ways people respond to sexual violence.

The Vaster Wilds is very dark and depressing, so tread carefully, but “creepy early modern” is one of my favorite categories of book. If you liked the character-driven narrative of Matrix or the psychological twists of Fates and Furies, then you will like this book as well, as long as you are prepared to face some very dark and creepy crevices of human nature.