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Overview
Set in the near-future, Into the Forest is a powerfully imagined novel that focuses on the relationship between two teenage sisters living alone in their Northern California forest home.Over 30 miles from the nearest town, and several miles away from their nearest neighbor, Nell and Eva struggle to survive as society begins to decay and collapse around them. No single event precedes society's fall. There is talk of a war overseas and upheaval in Congress, but it still comes as a shock when the electricity runs out and gas is nowhere to be found. The sisters consume the resources left in the house, waiting for the power to return. Their arrival into adulthood, however, forces them to reexamine their place in the world and their relationship to the land and each other.
Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, Into the Forest is a mesmerizing and thought-provoking novel of hope and despair set in a frighteningly plausible near-future America.
Synopsis
In the tradition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Jean Hegland's fiction debut is a tale of two young women coping in the aftermath of the apocalypse. As anarchy and disease ravage the country, Eva and Nell, orphaned sisters living in the remote redwood forests of northern California, must learn to survive in an age of fear, superstition, and hunger, and to lay the foundations for the rebirth of civilization.
Publishers Weekly
Hegland's powerfully imagined first novel will make readers thankful for telephones and CD players while it underscores the vulnerability of lives dependent on technology. The tale is set in the near future: electricity has failed, mail delivery has stopped and looting and violence have destroyed civil order. In Northern California, 32 miles from the closest town, two orphaned teenage sisters ration a dwindling supply of tea bags and infested cornmeal. They remember their mother's warnings about the nearby forest, but as the crisis deepens, bears and wild pigs start to seem less dangerous than humans. From the first page, the sense of crisis and the lucid, honest voice of the 17-year-old narrator pull the reader in, and the fight for survival adds an urgent edge to her coming-of-age story. Flashbacks smartly create a portrait of the lost family: an iconoclastic father, artistic mother and two independent daughters. The plot draws readers along at the same time that the details and vivid writing encourage rereading. Eating a hot dog starts with "the pillowy give of the bun," and the winter rains are "great silver needles stitching the dull sky to the sodden earth." If sometimes the lyricism goes a little too far, this is still a truly admirable addition to a genre defined by the very high standards of George Orwell's 1984 and Russell Hoban's Ridley Walker. (July)
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewNovember 1997
It is a future that is frighteningly palpable. A distant war rages overseas. The ordinary conveniences of everyday life — food, transportation, electricity — can no longer be taken for granted. Deadly diseases have mutated and become stronger. In this milieu, two young girls on the cusp of womanhood discover themselves and each other. Jean Hegland's first novel, Into the Forest, eloquently tells their story and, in doing so, effortlessly captures the beauty of humanity.
Eva, 18, and Nell, 17, are sisters who live in a house situated in the middle of acres of California forest. Eva is an extremely dedicated ballerina. Her inexorable ardor for dance is matched only by her sister's thirst for knowledge. Eva wanted to audition for the San Francisco Ballet; now, without electricity, she dances to the unyielding, emotionless beat of the metronome. Nell wanted to attend Harvard; now she spends her days studying the encyclopedia. Both girls were home-schooled, so their lives have been slightly sheltered — but never as sheltered as when their parents died, leaving them to survive by their wits in a truly uncertain world.
Is this a tale about two girls surviving in an unthinkable postapocalyptic future, a sort of Pride and Prejudice meets 1984? Thankfully, no. Hegland leaves the details of the world's breakdown quite vague. There is a dire shortage of natural resources, there is disease, war...or, as Hegland says, "We have so many problems today that if the apocalypse does come, I think it will be a combination of things."Butthat is not what this story is about. The world that Hegland creates is an environment, a catalyst for the much more profoundly moving story of her protagonists.
The story is told by Nell in the first person and moves between the present and various past moments in the girls' lives. As you read Hegland's wonderful prose, especially her lush descriptions and skillful metaphors, you will be introduced to characters that have the breath of life. The girls' father has a kind of hopeful cynicism. The mother is quiet, introspective, sometimes seeming not to care, though she always does. Eva's and Nell's thoughts and words flow with the logic and feeling of actual human beings.
Hegland's novel explores both self-discovery and the discovery of others. One of the simplest (yet, paradoxically, most complex) goals a writer can achieve is to tell a story about life — about the value, the wonder, the diversity of life. With Into the Forest, Jean Hegland goes beyond this goal, presenting a tale whose characters come alive. You believe in the lives she creates, and you might even recognize yourself.