The New Wilderness

Summary (from the publisher): 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.

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this novel from HarperCollins. 

What lengths would you go to in order to save your child's life? This is the fundamental question Bea must ask herself as she watches her young daughter Agnes wasting away in the smog and population of the City. When she is granted permission to volunteer with a group to live in the Wilderness State as part of a study to explore how humans can co-exist with nature. In the fresh air of the Wilderness, Agnes thrives. But the community lives a brutal existence as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the dangerous wild. Their life is about survival off the land and Bea watches as her daughter grows more and more wild and distant from her. And even as they struggle to survive, a new threat emerges, as their ability to continue to live in the Wilderness is called into question.

Set in the unspecified future, this novel was a powerful what if, of choosing between a pollution riddled city or the risk of trying to survive off the land with nothing but what you can carry on your back. Every move Bea makes as she negotiates for power and resources to keep her family alive are the difference between life and death. Yet as if this struggle to survive isn't enough, now Bea and the community must contend with the encroaching threat of losing the Wilderness. This dual threat keeps the momentum of the novel moving forward. 

Much of the background story is vague and only hinted at in this novel. The reader doesn't know the year or why the City is so polluted. Similarly, how the Wilderness escaped the pollution is unexplained or why the Rangers wield such power. Or who wields power in the City is undisclosed for that matter. Despite the sketchy frame story, imagining a world that makes its characters choose between a grim, industrial landscape and a rugged wild land provided an intriguing plot. 

Stars: 4