The New Wilderness
A mother takes her sick daughter into the Wilderness State, the last wild land in an overcrowded world, and the novel becomes a brutal, beautiful examination of what we sacrifice and what we owe to the next generation. Cook's debut is one of the decade's most original speculative visions.
Diane Cook's Community hauls a rulebook it barely opens, and readers say too many practical questions about how the experiment runs go unanswered, right down to a suspiciously convenient vehicle at a key plot point. Time itself goes missing: “no-one knows how many days, months or years pass” between scenes, and a continuity gripe notes the daughter's growth doesn't match the years the text implies. Several reviewers wanted a hundred pages cut. One irritated reader calls the whole premise “A cross between The Hunger Games and I'm A Celebrity,” and another says flatly “Nothing in this novel hasn't already been done better,” pointing to Margaret Atwood as the standard the book falls short of.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
