Helpful Score: 2
[close] If things ever truly go to hell, this is a book I'm going to throw into my rucksack as my family and I flee the city to live off the land. That sounds pithy, but it's also true.
In Into the Forest, Hegland paints a very grim dystopian view of the near-future United States. The national banking market has collapsed, mail is no longer running, and the government has all but disolved. As readers, we're given very little explanation of exactly what happened and how the nation became the way it is, but its an interesting effect. The 17- and 18-year-old sisters that are the center of the story don't know why the power stopped working or what has happened to the Internet, either.
This book is a more mature, and darker view than that posed by another, similar book I read recently, Life As We Knew It. But where in that book, the young herione has the guidance of her mother and older brother to help her along, and where rationing canned goods and pilaging abandoned homes are the biggest threats, Into the Forest poses a different stark horror. (spoiler alert!) The sisters are starving and truly living off the land, eating roots, using plants for medicine and learning to live as our ancestors did. One of the sisters is raped by a wanderer, becomes pregnant and gives birth. The experience of the sisters struggling to deliver and later save this newborn when they are starving themselves was difficult to read, but inspiring.
The book, though so grim throughout, does end with hope. It's not a book I'd rush to read again, but I won't get rid of it, either. Because, well, you never know. [close]
In Into the Forest, Hegland paints a very grim dystopian view of the near-future United States. The national banking market has collapsed, mail is no longer running, and the government has all but disolved. As readers, we're given very little explanation of exactly what happened and how the nation became the way it is, but its an interesting effect. The 17- and 18-year-old sisters that are the center of the story don't know why the power stopped working or what has happened to the Internet, either.
This book is a more mature, and darker view than that posed by another, similar book I read recently, Life As We Knew It. But where in that book, the young herione has the guidance of her mother and older brother to help her along, and where rationing canned goods and pilaging abandoned homes are the biggest threats, Into the Forest poses a different stark horror. (spoiler alert!) The sisters are starving and truly living off the land, eating roots, using plants for medicine and learning to live as our ancestors did. One of the sisters is raped by a wanderer, becomes pregnant and gives birth. The experience of the sisters struggling to deliver and later save this newborn when they are starving themselves was difficult to read, but inspiring.
The book, though so grim throughout, does end with hope. It's not a book I'd rush to read again, but I won't get rid of it, either. Because, well, you never know. [close]
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