INTO THE FOREST: A Novel by Jean Hegland - Review

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 

Description: A serious exploration of the MC's self and her and her sister's places in the world as it changes in radical and unexpected ways. Alone, they spend the year they expected to spend prepping to leave for college adjusting to a new reality in which the forest will either sustain them or kill them. 

Mood: Get away from it all- even toiletries, stable shelf goods, music, electricity, and any other modern convenience you can name.. but the forest is beautiful in spring and summer

A very serious look at what it means to be human, what it means to be a sister, and what it means to even exist in this world. The descriptive differences in the MC's journal between surviving and living are palpable at times, exacerbated in its intensity by the effect of the Encyclopedia passages that are fluidly woven in through out her entries.

The story is told in the form of one of the two sisters - Nell's journal entries. Early in the book, the girls celebrate what they estimate roughly to be their first Christmas alone with no power, no family, and no idea of when things will return to normal. With no way to leave home, which is 30 miles from the nearest small, isolated town; they're forced to get creative in their gift giving.

For years, Eva has practiced ballet religiously with aspirations of going professional. She even has a small but proper dance studio in their home and was preparing to leave home next year. So Nell repairs her ballet shoes for her as her gift. 

Nell was studying to go to Harvard and the following year and desperately misses her computer, books, and language tapes. So when Eva found a notebook that was unused, she knew that Nell would love having a place to record things. This format works very well for the story because it allows the author to skip the large sections of time that would obviously be spent doing repetitive tasks, or nothing at all.

Late in the book, after describing the use they've gotten from the byproducts of the wild sow she hunted, Nell writes, ' Sometimes I feel as though I were bearing her feral old soul along with my own. Sometimes at dusk, when Eva and I come down off the hill and reenter the house to sleep, I find myself looking around these rooms with a sort of sideways terror. I have to remind myself, That's just a door. Those are only walls. They can't hurt you. And sometimes when I wake in the morning, my first though is panic -- I've got to get outside.'. This comes just 6-8 months after Eva's rape by a traveling stranger, which forced the two into a fit of paranoid indoor hiding for several months. 

However, the journal passages written in-between the two events show how these changes unfold over the spring and summer months. The girls who were once orphaned and abandoned have become women of this new - and yet very, very old - world. Tragedies and hardships that once would have rendered them unable or unwilling to go on have become no less horrific - but they are now surmountable events. 

The drive to join the wilderness completely slowly becomes stronger and stronger for these two women. Though each will find their own way into the forest, they will find themselves brought together ultimately by the beauty and by the sheer life to be found all around them.