The beauty was in the details. Heavy world building was not needed, for our characters lived in a world of solitude, away from the rest of a population in ruin. Survival and perseverance were the core values at the center of this world. If reading about day-to-day existence would not interest you, then this might not be a book you'd appreciate, which is fine. For me, I devoured this story in almost one sitting. As a child, I loved the Little House books. My favorites being Little House in the Big Woods and The Long Winter, the common thread between those two stories being the elements of day-to-day survival and finding the means to care for oneself with limited resources. I also had fascination with Claire's use of plants for medicinal purposes in the book Outlander, which is also a part of what happens in this particular tale.

Eva dances without music. It's a pointlessly feverish dream like if someone lost their legs and can still feel them. What the hell is she expressing anyway? She wants to be great, but c'mon it isn't going to happen. There is no one to see her dance. She has no emotions to express, other than her own desire to be "great". She may as well wear a wedding dress or put on outfits for parties she's never going to go to. I felt that Hegland tried to hard with the rotten dreams of Eva. Being "great" doesn't really mean anything. Sure, I could write here right now that I performed an awesome John Lennon frog legs dance. If you can't see me doing it what does it matter? Applause, please! I could write about some story I plan to write that no one will ever read, as Nell does, that doesn't even do anything for me. Pity, please! Eye rolls. Somewhere in the near future, a dozen miles outside a town like Cloverdale or Red Bluff or Redding (it’s called “Redwood” in the book), the two sisters try to carry on with life in their family cabin, gradually realizing that the worst has happened. Yep,” our father would say, before we all wandered off to nibble at the turkey carcass and cut slivers off the cold plum pudding, “that’s the story. Could be better, could be worse. But at least there’s a baby at the center of it.” But this story holds the outside world at bay; we have only vague notion of the collapse of modern society outside the northern California forest where two sisters in their late teens struggle to survive. Living with their parents in a home 30 miles from the nearest town, home-schooled and pursuing solitary passions, Eva and Nell are accustomed to isolation. But as their connections to society are severed and as society dies away, the sisters are forced to become pioneers on their own land, guardians of their homestead and safety. But now, everyone knows something is really wrong — even before batteries ran out of energy and radios sputtered news of a vague, distant war “taking place to protect freedoms, to defend a way of life the politicians promised,” writes Nell. “Some people said it was that war that caused the breakdown.”And then of course there is Ursula Le Guin—famously a resident of Portland, Oregon, but born and raised in California. As the daughter of Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, she must have grown up with the story of Ishi in her very bones, and although I am not aware that she has made any reference to it in her fiction (nor to Stewart’s masterpiece in her non-fiction), her major book Always Coming Home may be viewed as another version of the same cyclical, Ishi-inspired story. It is set in Northern California, centuries hence, but instead of recounting the fall of our own civilization and the very beginnings of the new (as do London, and Stewart, and Jean Hegland) it tells of the long-term consequences: it is a utopian account, recollected in tranquillity, of a neo-tribal society based on California Indian ways—in short, it is Ishi vindicated. Even if, according to the bride and groom’s parents, the occasion was long overdue and perhaps, for their sophisticated hosts, the event was a touch slapdash. Fortunately, there was far more to celebrate than there were reasons to complain. Not the least of which was the venue, a grand apartment in a posh Vilna neighborhood, a city that was no doubt flush with cosmopolitan allure for a young provincial couple exploring its delights in 1933. What kind of childhood do you think Eva’s baby will have? If technology and society were to return to advanced states, how might the child adapt to leaving the forest? On top of that, what are the chances that this same woman and her family survived the Holocaust in the first place by hiding in a Polish forest for two years? Keeping in mind they had two young children who had to be kept quiet at all times and they had to live in only temporary, handmade structures that could camouflage them from roaming bands of Nazis. Never mind the weather, the illnesses, and the starvation they had to endure. The series of coincidences, miraculous events, acts of bravery, pure fortitude, and the kindnesses of others that led to this family’s survival almost defies belief.

This my friends, is the danger of home-schooling your children and isolating them from the real world. They may initially survive the demise of the world as we know it but will make insufferable decisions and, in the real world, would have been dead by the third chapter. In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods―through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids―until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.There are some rather strange happenings and a rather dreary feeling throughout. This was an odd read I must say but I could not get into the book no matter how I tried. And I did try. Griffiths, Megan. "I Wasn't Hired to Direct Into the Forest – Here's What I Thought of the Film" . Retrieved 30 November 2016. Does the lifestyle the sisters adopt in Into the Forest imply or require an abandonment of the whole notion of “advanced civilization?” It is not out of the realm of possibility that if we continue to live so carelessly, someday we too could be saying, "When I think of how we used to live, the casual way we used things, I'm both appalled and filled with longing. I remember emptying wastebaskets that would seem like fortunes now - baskets filled with the cardboard cores of toilet paper rolls, with used tissues, broken pencils, twisted paper clips, sheets of crumpled notebook paper, and empty plastic bags ..." Hegland’s debut novel…is beautifully written, moving, and the kind of tale one has to call ‘wise’—a small masterpiece, in fact.”

Max Minghella and Callum Keith Rennie Join 'Into the Forest' (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety. 27 August 2014 . Retrieved 2 October 2014. How would you answer the question raised by this novel and posed in The Sunday Oregonian:“Where are we heading, and do we know how to survive with our humanity intact if we continue in this direction?” Goddamn right we aren’t,” said our father, laying down his pen, bounding up from the table by the front window, already warming to the energy of his own talk. Rebecca Frankel’s connection to the family and desire to tell their story is what attracted me to this book. The writing and piecing together from interviews and research kept me reading. The author’s note at the end along with recorded interviews on the audio book made this an immediate buy and keep forever book for me. Masterful! Ever since reading The Forest of Vanishing Stars I wanted to know more about the Jews that hid in the forest and I was very pleased to receive a copy of this.

To answer questions on a text

and there was a period when i thought, "hey - these girls finally have it together and are taking real steps towards their own survival," only to modify that somewhat later to, "oh, these characters are making decisions that will have literary appeal and dramatic heft. There are no strings of lights, no Christmas cards. There are no piles of presents, no long-distance phone calls from great-aunts and second cousins, no Christmas carols. There is no turkey, no plum pudding, no stroll to the bridge with our parents, no Messiah. This year Christmas is nothing but another white square on a calendar that is almost out of dates, an extra cup of tea, a few moments of candlelight, and, for each of us, a single gift. In botany and dendrology, A rhizome is the main stem of the plant that runs underground horizontally. (And sometimes above the ground, but let’s not confuse matters.) Ginger is an example of a rhizone. How is literary intertextuality like a stem-like root-type of thing?