The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

 genre: historical fiction

For the servant girl, when she decides that she'd rather face the wilds of the forest than starve to death inside the sturdy walls of the fort, she's making an un-makable choice.  As she travels through the wilderness, trying to feed and care for her body, she also finds herself often inside her mind, processing and considering how she arrived at this place.  We see the life of a orphaned child who ends up in the New World and it is nearly all tragic, but what she learns on her own in the forest is the one thing that she is able to claim for her own.

I don't know how this book got on my list, honestly, and when I got it from the library I had no idea of what it was about when I started so I kept thinking it would go in a different direction than it did, and that's on me.  There is beauty here, yes. There are big and small ideas to think about and some powerfully beautiful writing.  Thoughts about God and colonization and the spirit in the Land itself.  However, it is just so dang sad.  You need to be in a good headspace because one part of this book actually made my hand fly over my mouth with the big upset feelings it gave me.  It is not a happy Jamestown Fort story. It is a survival story with a young girl at its center, learning not just about how to survive but where her place in the world could even be.