Bea’s five-year old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away in front of her. The smog and pollution of the City–the over-populated, over-built metropolis where most of the population lives in buildings on top of buildings, where there is no room for parks or plants–is destroying her lungs. If they stay in the City, Agnes will die.
Across the country is the Wilderness State, a huge swath of … swath of protected land, remote and unwelcoming, a refuge for wildlife with nowhere else to go. It is a place of open spaces and clean air, wild animals, trees, forests, desert plains. No people have ever been allowed into the Wilderness State.
Until now. Bea and Agnes will be among the first. Along with a handful of others, they are invited into the Wilderness State, to live as nomadic hunter gatherers. This motley group of twenty people are part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature and not just dominate it as they have always done. Can they be part of the wilderness and not put too heavy an imprint on the land? They spend their days wandering through this grand country, hunting, gathering, avoiding animal attacks, bickering among themselves, and doing a surprising amount of paperwork. Their nit-picking overseers, The Rangers, wrangle with them and badger them into adhering to the rules of the Government, the most important being Leave No Trace. They slowly learn how to live, and survive, on the unpredictable, often dangerous land, and they build a new kind of community, fighting among themselves for power, betraying and saving one another. Each day they will walk to another point on the horizon and try to make sense of new lives they now spend closer to their animal soul.
Bea discovers that fleeing to the Wilderness State to save Agnes means that she loses her in a different way. Agnes grows wild and belongs to the landscape while Bea, raised in the City, will always be of that place and drawn to it, no matter how many deer she skins. The real bond between mother and daughter will be tested by their growing difference.
As these modern nomads come to think of the Wilderness State as home, this land will come under attack from the Government which plans to develop it. Do the Settlers stay on as renegades, or move back to newly created urban areas?
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I will start by saying that if you enjoy books where you get no answers and are forced to draw your own conclusions about just about everything then this one may be for you.
I was really looking forward to this dystopian fiction. Everything about it sounded like something I would love. 20 people volunteer to go into the wilderness to see if they can co-exist in nature as part of a study. Every so often they have to go to a post where they have to fill in paperwork for a study and provide blood. For what? We don’t know. They get instructions of where to travel each time they leave a post. Why? We don’t know. We find out the City is getting worse. Why? No idea. And the ending, What?! The relationship between Agnes and Bea was also totally perplexing.
Thank you to Harper Perennial for the gifted copy.
Gut-wrenching, heart-wrecking, this is a book that demands to be read, and urgently.
A virtuosic debut, brutal and beautiful in equal measure.
Diana Cook writes really well. In this book she examines the relationships that develop among a group dropped into the last surviving wilderness. There is particular emphasis on the complicated bond between daughter and mother, Bea and Agnes. Both these characters immediately won my empathy. As the book continues, Cook look at the dynamic of all relationships within this last wilderness, the love within a family group, the alliances and enmity within the community and later the mistrust between the original group, (the originalists) and other newer groups. Cook has used The New Wilderness as a vehicle to delve deep into the way in which individuals and societies relate to each other. She has included the Rangers as the de facto government who are completely out of whack with the community.
I have seen that some reviewers compare this book to The Hunger Games, and I can see why, but I think drawing that comparison is to completely miss the point of this novel. I enjoyed it immensely and I look forward to seeing what Cook produces next.
Science Fiction seems to have its own voice, tense, beat. This voice is unique to the genre and I seldom see or feel it in literary fiction. The dialogue seems stunted, almost machine-like. This book reminded me of “Station 11” another future based apocalyptic work.
In the future the City is polluted and overcrowded and people can volunteer to be part of an experiment where they live in the Wilderness. The group we follow lives a nomadic existence similar to that of the indigenous people of North America and the rangers are a slight, subtle nod at the white man’s abuse of those peoples. The role of the Matriarch and the relationship with her daughters and a nodding acceptance of the males is an underlying theme.
I normally love debut novels; this title leaves me wondering why I return to this type of science fiction. Some have wondered if this is a book about the environment. While man’s abuse and destruction of the environment and his meager attempt to save it is the basis for the story, the message seemed to get lost in the story like a struggling swimmer coming back up for air.
Intriguing, suspenseful a very dark read that will take you to many crazy scenarios that you won’t see them coming.
The new wilderness is a story that reminds me of the hunger games or movies that the characters spend time trying to survive in crazy circumstances that are making their life impossible to live.
Many tests will be put in place to make these characters afraid to continue their journey, but they know everything is about surviving, they will have to even sacrifice things and people they love and make many decisions that will make them feel uncomfortable at times but knowing this is the only way to survive.
I haven’t read any book like this one before, the angst is present at all times, you always feel like something is going to happen, like something will show up or like whatever the characters are expecting will be worst. so there is always that anxious feeling that something is going to drop.
Basically what I felt while reading this book was so much sadness and as if the characters didn’t have any hope at all and they were just trying to survive but without any goal on the horizon. every day it felt like a burden or like a constant fight, they couldn’t even trust each other because all of them had something to hide or something to fight.
Overall, it wasn’t an easy ride or an easy book, this story was challenging and it will test you a lot of times but also will make you want to know more and keep reading until the end.