Into the Forest, Jean Hegland
This novel, published in 1998, won the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) Nominee for Fiction (Finalist) (1997), and James Tiptree Jr. Award Nominee for Longlist (1996). It is currently a movie directed by Ellen Page, airing June 3, 2016.
See Dragonfly’s blog post about the movie based off the book.
Into the Forest haunts with its larger vision of a world in collapse, made all the more affecting because we’re told so little about it. One day the power goes out—with a whimper, not a bang—and then it simply never comes back. With all forms of mass communication gone besides rumour and Chinese whispers, humans are left very much in the dark. “That’s truthful to me,” Rozema remarks. “The absence of knowing is what’s going to be difficult for lots of people. I would find that just terrifying.”
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.
Goodreads Reviews
3.8 rating based on 12,729 ratings (all editions)
ISBN-10: 0553379615
ISBN-13: 9780553379617
Goodreads: 86236
Author(s): Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Published: 9/1/1998
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.