The Vaster Wilds

An enjoyable - but for me, fatally flawed - novel.

I had an affection for the main character, she of multiple names: Lamentations, Wench, Zed, and others. I appreciated the premise and the start-in-the-middle structure was well executed and mostly maintained tension throughout. The writing itself, while once or twice slightly overreaching, was often poetic and quite beautiful.

My issue with The Vaster Wilds, and I fully realize this may be a highly individual complaint, is that I was absolutely confounded by the way Groff wrote about wild places, geography and topography. My life has been one largely spent outside, and I found myself constantly disoriented by her descriptions. I was unable to suspend my disbelief in places where the events are simply not physically possible, like maintaining a fire inside a hollowed out tree that is also providing total shelter from torrential rain, somehow allowing enough oxygen for the fire the burn and having an exhaust for smoke to escape, yet remaining water tight and also managing not to catch the tree in fire from the inside out.

It bums me out to feel like I'm being pedantic, but so many passages just left me pulling out my hair. For me, Groff needed a great deal more personal experience alone in wild places in order to make this the gr at book it could have been.