AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023 NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, LA TIMES, SLATE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and others “Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR staff pick “Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel."—Los Angeles Times “Glorious…surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page." —Boston Globe A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her. Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.

Lauren Groff now has the unique (and unfortunate) honor of getting every NUBClub rating an author can get. We have generally liked and even loved Groff's work, but The Vaster Wilds swings hard in the opposite direction. The book is just not good. The core is the story of a servant girl who escapes from a starving fort in the American colonies and tries to survive on a journey to an unknown new life. We follow the girl as she roams in the American wilderness, scrambling for food and shelter, encountering others briefly, and remembering how she got to the Americans and what led her to flee. Groff is a very good writing and there are some very strong passages in the book. In particular, many times in the novel the girl will look up from her struggles to notice the wonder of the natural world and Groff does a great job creating that sense of beauty and awe. The problem is the story of girl doesn't make sense, logically or aesthetically. To begin with, the entire book is about the girl learning to survive in the wilderness, but it's not believable how adept she is. She is very quickly figuring out how to catch food, repair clothing, and do all sorts of survival skills that nothing in her history reveals she would know. She's a servant in Britain who attends to families. This isn't to say she doesn't have skills, but could she in days figure out what her whole fort clearly didn't know? None of us bought how quickly she was adapting to a completely alien environment. Also, the very ending was confusingly written and half of NUBClub was sure a hallucination was actually a real occurrence. But equally troubling was what her story represented to us. It's clear the wilderness is very hostile and she doesn't know how to work with it. This seems to imply that she should be working with others to survive and that it's isolation that's hurting her. In fact, she herself wonders if she made a mistake not approaching others near the end of the story. But when she remembers her time in the fort, it's basically an nearly endless series of tortures, from sexual violence to starvation to dehumanization. With the exception of her mentally handicapped ward, no one is admirable or even supportive in the fort. So what's the answer for this character? Should she have stayed in a hell of famine and hypocrisy? Did she do the right thing by wandering out in an unrelentingly punishing wilderness? Blurbs for the novel call it a fable, but is it just a fable of how screwed up the American colonies were? Isn't that just torture porn in the end? Torture porn is certainly what it felt like to us. We just don't know why Groff needed to tell this story, and if all we get is something this confusing, punishing, and ultimately pointless we're not sure why we should read it either.