Michael: Okay, Kevin. Five-word review for The Vaster Wilds. Kevin: Girl escapes hell, finds colder hell. Michael: Ooh, bleak. I like it. Mine is: 'Nature doesn't care, God is weird.' Kevin: That also works. That really, really works. It’s a brutal book. Michael: It is. And that's the perfect entry point for today's book, The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. What's fascinating is that Groff, who's a multiple National Book Award finalist, immersed herself in Shakespearean and Elizabethan language to write this. She wanted to get inside the head of a 17th-century girl, to make her thoughts feel raw and real, not like a modern person in costume. Kevin: So we're not just getting a history lesson, we're getting a whole mindset. That's ambitious. It explains why the prose feels so… elemental. Almost biblical at times. Michael: Exactly. And it throws you right into the deep end. The book opens on a moonless, icy night, with our protagonist, just a slip of a girl, escaping a starving colonial fort.

Kevin: Hold on. She's fleeing a starving fort in the dead of winter? Into a wilderness she knows nothing about? That sounds like trading a slow death for a fast one. What could possibly be so bad in that fort that this seems like a good idea? Michael: That is the question the entire book is built on. And Groff gives us the answer in a devastating flashback. Just four days before her escape, the girl is desperately trying to save a child she adores, named Bess, who is wasting away from starvation. Kevin: Another mouth to feed in a starving fort. That’s already a tragic setup. Michael: It's worse. The girl remembers a hillside where she saw carrot-like roots in the fall. So, in the middle of the night, she risks a slit throat to sneak out of the fort, runs to this snow-covered hill, and digs with her bare hands until they are frozen stiff just to find a few of these roots. Kevin: That’s incredible dedication. She must have really loved this child. Michael: She did. She gets back, builds a secret fire, and boils these roots into a thin soup. She carries this precious, hot kettle through the dark, dangerous lanes of the settlement, past other starving, manic people, to get to Bess. But when she arrives, Bess, who is almost catatonic from the horror of it all, refuses to eat. Kevin: Oh, no. After all that. Michael: And here's the turn. The minister—the girl's master and Bess's stepfather—and his wife, Bess's mother, smell the food. They come over and gobble down their own bowls without a second thought. Then, when Bess still won't eat, the minister reaches to snatch the child's bowl for himself. Kevin: You have got to be kidding me. Michael: And the girl, after everything she's risked, just snaps. She grabs the bowl back and, staring her master dead in the eye, drinks the soup herself. It's this incredible act of defiance. She knows, in her heart, that her right to that food she risked her life for is superior to his, even though legally, she and everything she touches belongs to him. Kevin: What does he do? Michael: He can't yell at her, because that would reveal they had food when everyone else was starving. So he waits. And then he just punches her in the stomach with all his might. Because, as the book says, it was in the rights of the master to punish the servants within his house. Kevin: Wow. Okay, now I get it. The wilderness might kill you, but at least it's not personal. That minister... he's a monster. The fort is the real horror. Michael: Exactly. And Groff is setting up a key theme here. The 'civilized' world of the fort, with its religion and social hierarchy, is actually more savage and cruel than the 'wild' world outside. The real monsters are the men in power. Her escape isn't an adventure; it's a refugee fleeing a warzone.

Michael: And that trauma, that cruelty, doesn't just disappear when she runs. It follows her. It becomes its own kind of wilderness inside her head. Kevin: You mean her memories? Or is it more than that? Michael: It's much more. She's not just running from the fort; she's running from a past filled with abuse and loss. And as she gets deeper into the wilderness, her body starts to fail. She develops a raging fever, and the lines between reality, memory, and hallucination completely dissolve. Kevin: That sounds terrifying. To be sick and completely alone out there. Michael: It is. There's a scene, about fifteen days into her journey, where she realizes she has smallpox. She's blazing with fever, and she stumbles into a sunlit clearing. And suddenly, she's no longer in the woods. She's at a lavish feast from her past. Kevin: A hallucination? Michael: A full-sensory one. She sees a table laden with a suckling pig, roasted swan, meat pies, and a centerpiece made of sugar-paste—a sculpture of the Tyburn gallows, with tiny thieves hanging from it. It’s this grotesque mix of luxury and death. And then, the child Bess appears beside her, smelling of milk and piss, and puts her head on the girl's shoulder. The girl feels this overwhelming wave of love and richness. Kevin: So it's like her mind is giving her the one thing she desperately needs—food and comfort—but in the cruelest way possible, because it's not real. It's a psychological mirage. Michael: Precisely. And it's not just about comfort. Groff shows how her imagination is also a survival tool. At other times, to give herself a reason to keep going, she invents this elaborate fantasy of a future with a handsome French trapper. She imagines their cabin, the food they'll have, their eventual return to a civilized life in France. Her mind is both her tormentor and her savior. Kevin: This is where the book got some mixed reviews, right? I saw some readers found these internal, repetitive struggles a bit slow. But it sounds like that's the whole point—the real action is happening inside her. Michael: That's the literary genius of it, and why it's been compared to Cormac McCarthy. The external plot is brutally simple: a girl walks north. But the story is this epic internal battle against grief, trauma, and despair. The physical journey is just the stage for the psychological one.

Kevin: Okay, so she's surviving physically, she's battling her own mind... but where does God fit into all this? She's clearly religious, she prays constantly. Michael: This is where the book becomes truly radical, especially for a historical novel. Her faith is tested to its absolute limit, and it breaks... into something new. The key moment is her encounter with a bear at a waterfall. Kevin: I remember this scene. It was so strange and powerful. Michael: She's been pursued by something, and she finds this tiny hidden cave behind a massive waterfall. She's terrified. But in the middle of the night, she looks out and sees a gigantic bear, the height of three men, sitting in the pool below, just... watching the water. Kevin: And she thinks the bear is... praying? Or feeling awe? Michael: Exactly. She looks at this massive, powerful creature, and she believes she sees 'a sense of wonder' in its expression. And that's her epiphany. Her mind makes a stunning leap of logic. She thinks, 'If a bear can feel awe, then a bear can certainly know God.' And if a bear can know God, then it has a soul. Kevin: And if it has a soul, then what right do humans have to 'dominion' over it? Michael: You've got it. It shatters her entire worldview. She starts questioning the Book of Genesis, the idea that God belongs only to men, only to Christians. She realizes God might be 'multiple,' present in everything, in the bear, in the trees, in herself. Kevin: And this is a 17th-century servant girl thinking this! That's heresy. It's a direct challenge to the entire colonial project, which was justified by bringing their 'one true God' to the 'godless' natives. Michael: You've nailed it. Groff is using this lone, forgotten girl to deconstruct the very myth of American Genesis. The 'vaster wilds' aren't just the woods; they're a vaster, more inclusive, more terrifying and beautiful concept of God. She escapes the punishing God of the patriarchy and finds a wild, indifferent, and ultimately more profound divinity in nature itself.

Michael: So in the end, the story isn't just about survival. It's a journey of deconstruction. She escapes the fort, a symbol of colonial patriarchy. She survives the wilderness, which strips her of her physical and psychological identity. And in that nothingness, she finds a new, more profound connection to the universe. Kevin: It makes you wonder what 'civilization' even means. She finds more mercy from a bear, which spares her life, than from the minister in her own settlement. It completely flips the script on who the 'savages' really are. Michael: It does. And it culminates in that final, haunting vision where she's dying of smallpox. After all her fears of being killed by men or beasts, she has this moment of dark, absurd peace when she realizes her ultimate foe wasn't the cold or the animals, but the disease that was already inside her. Kevin: A foe she carried with her from the 'civilized' world. That's a chilling final thought. Michael: It is. It's a powerful, challenging book that really stays with you. Kevin: It definitely does. For our listeners, what was the most powerful moment of survival or transformation for you in this story? Let us know your thoughts. We'd love to hear them. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.