Sep 19

Sep 19 The New Wilderness

Author: Diane Cook
Publisher: Harper Books
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A debut novel that explores a mother-daughter relationship in a world ravaged by climate change and overpopulation, a suspenseful second book from the author of the story collection, Man V. Nature.

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the City—an over-populated, over-built metropolis where most of the population lives—is destroying her lungs. But what can Bea do? No one leaves the City anymore, because there is nowhere else to go. But across the country lies the Wilderness State, the last swath of open, protected land left. Here forests and desert plains are inhabited solely by wildlife. People are forbidden. Until now.

Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State as part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature. Can they be part of the wilderness and not destroy it? Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, this new community wanders through the grand country, trying to adhere to the strict rules laid down by the Rangers, whose job it is to remind them they must Leave No Trace. As the group slowly learns to live and survive on the unpredictable and often dangerous land, its members battle for power and control and betray and save each other. The farther they roam, the closer they come to their animal soul.

To her dismay, Bea discovers that, in fleeing to the Wilderness State to save Agnes, she is losing her in a different way. Agnes is growing wilder and closer to the land, while Bea cannot shake her urban past. As she and Agnes grow further apart, the bonds between mother and daughter are tested in surprising and heartbreaking ways.

Yet just as these modern nomads come to think of the Wilderness State as home, its future is threatened when the Government discovers a new use for the land. Now the migrants must choose to stay and fight for their place in the wilderness, their home, or trust the Rangers and their promises of a better tomorrow elsewhere.

TL;DR Review

The New Wilderness is an immersive, quietly excellent book about survival, motherhood, growing up, and the beauty of the world around us. I really liked it.

For you if: You are looking for literary dystopia.

Full Review

The New Wilderness is shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and after reading it, it’s clear why. This book is dark, compelling, immersive, and just plain expertly crafted. I don’t think it will be for everyone — it’s not very fast paced — but if you often enjoy the kind of books nominated for the Booker, I think you’ll like this one too.

“The Administration” is trying to discern if humans can live in nature again without harming it. A group of people agree to take part in the study and pack up and leave The City, where all people now live amid pollution and overpopulation. The main characters are Bea and Agnes, mother and daughter. The city was making Agnes sick, so leaving for the last wilderness is her Bea’s only hope of saving her. We get this in flashbacks, though — the novel starts several years after they’ve already been there and learned to survive.

This book’s excellence is quiet, but firm. It’s just plain good writing. It’s so clear that Cook is an expert at the craft, knows exactly what she is doing when she puts pen to paper. One thing I was particularly impressed with was how she manipulates time and space, speeding up so a whole year passes and then slowling down to a single night; zooming in to Agnes’s heart and zooming out so the group itself becomes a distinct character. In certain passages, it almost feels like you could be flying above them, a hawk or eagle, watching them traverse and struggle. Immersive and captivating, if you let yourself get swept away.

The book starts from Bea’s third-person narration, but eventually switches to Agnes, who is by then a preteen and, eventually, a teenager — we follow these characters for a very long stretch of time. That means we really get to know both of them, which is how Diane Cook brings out a fierce examination of both motherhood and daughterhood, about how mothers and daughters yearn to be both part of and apart from one another, how they can hurt one another so deeply and yet love one another despite it all.

Also, the opening scene of this novel is excellent: raw, devastating, the perfect set-up for the beauty and brutality of the world these characters live in. And then the second section, which is short, just plain sings. It could have stood alone. It could have been a prologue, or an opening chapter. But by placing it second, Cook creates a shape and pattern for the narration that hooks you and promises so much more.

There’s so much to learn about writing from this book. And about humanity, and relationships, and what we will do to survive and save the ones we love.