The New Wilderness

In The New Wilderness, there’s the City — overpopulated, smog-filled — and the Wilderness State, where people are forbidden — except a group of 20 people, called the “Community,” who get special dispensation to live as nomads on the land only if they leave no trace. Bea signs up herself and her 5-year-old daughter, Agnes, who is dying of an illness caused by the air quality, and her husband, an academic, Glenn. Bea hopes by bringing her daughter to the Wilderness State, it will cure her. What follows is a tale of a mother and daughter navigating their relationship and the wild and everything in between. It’s an imaginative, dystopian look at what our world could become. I was gripped by how vivid the story was, how expertly Diane Cook got into the dynamics of a group of strangers surviving in the wild, and their relationship with those in power.

What I admired most, however, was how Cook ends her story with a land acknowledgement. “This is a work of fiction set in the future, and any connection to the real world or real people is coincidental. However I visited real places and environments… [and] I would like to acknowledge the Northern Paitue, Shoshone, Klamath, Modoc, Molala, Bannock, and Washoe tribes, whose ancestral lands provided inspiration for where these characters lived and walked.” This is especially meaningful, because so much of Western literature focuses on the wilderness as unexplored or untamed — when, no, there were people living there. There are people living there.

Rating: ★★★★★