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NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE * 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. Praise for Into the Forest "[A] beautifully written and often profoundly moving novel."--San Francisco Chronicle "A work of extraordinary power, insight and lyricism, Into the Forest is both an urgent warning and a passionate celebration of life and love."--Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade "From the first page, the sense of crisis and the lucid, honest voice of the . . . narrator pull the reader in. . . . A truly admirable addition to a genre defined by the very high standards of George Orwell's 1984."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Beautifully written."--Kirkus Reviews "This beautifully written story captures the essential nature of the sister bond: the fierce struggle to be true to one's own self, only to learn that true strength comes from what they are able to share together."--Carol Saline, co-author of Sisters "Jean Hegland's sense of character is firm, warm, and wise. . . . [A] fine first novel."--John Keeble, author of Yellowfish… (mais)
sturlington: The underlying themes are similar: a return to the pre-industrial way of life, respect for the land, set in California post-apocalypse, with feminist undertones.
Uhh, kind of the weirdest apocalyptic story I've read recently. As an epistolary novel, it fails, big time and the "voice" is also too mature for an 18-year old. Read as a straight-up novel with a more adult protagonist, it works much better. There is a sexual assault a little past the mid-point that felt not-organic to the story. It's an obvious and clumsy plot device that makes most of the indirect results of the assault fucking weird.. There are some strange directions the story takes, mostly as a result of that spoiler-point, and that knocked my enjoyment of the story down from "weird, but uncomfortably good" to "weird, but uncomfortably weird". It's a small distinction but an important one. I don't need to feel happy and cozy when reading, and a good apocalyptic story shouldn't be cozy, but I don't want to be challenged for the sake of being challenged. ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
For Douglas Fisher and Garth Leonard Fisher
and in memory of Leonard Hegland
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
It's strange, writing these first words, like leaning down into the musty stillness of a well and seeing my face peer up from the water- so small and from such an unfamiliar angle I'm startled to realize the reflection is my own.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
"People have been around for at least 100,000 years. And how long have we had electricity?" "Well, Edison invented the incadescent lamp in 1879." "See? All this," and she swung her arm to encircle the rooms of the only house I'd ever know, "was only a fugue state." She pointed to the blackness framed by the open door. "Our real lives are out there."
It seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world.
I could not save all the stories, could not hope to preserve all the information - that was too vast, too disparate, perhaps even too dangerous. But I could take the encyclopedia's index, could try to keep that master list of all that had once been made or told or understood. Perhaps we could create new stories; perhaps we could discover a new knowledge that would sustain us. In the meantime, I would take the Index for memory's sake, so I could remember the map of all we'd had to leave behind.
It seemed the forest had everything we needed. Every mushroom or flower or fern or stone was a gift. Every noise was an adventure to be investigated. Frequently we saw deer or rabbits or heard the call of wild turkeys. Occasionally we glimpsed a grey fox or a skunk.
Slowly I'm beginning to untangle the forest, to attach names to the plants that fill it.... "Native Plants" says the maples in these woods will produce sugar sap, that coltsfoot leaves can give us salt, that the Indians who once lived here used Spanish moss for diapers, California poppy as a painkiller, and moulded acorn metal as an antibiotic. There are plants to stop fever, plants to relieve colds, plants to soothe rashes and menstrual cramps. There are teas.... And there are acorns. "Native Plants" says, "Worldwide and throughout history, acorns have served as a staple part of the diet of many peoples".
After all this time a pen feels stiff and awkward in my hand.
Eva's gift to me was this notebook. "It's not a computer," she said, as I lifted it from its wrinkled wrapping paper, recycled from some birthday long ago and not yet sacrificed as fire-starter. "But it's all blank, every page." "Blank paper!" I marvelled. "Where on earth did you get it?" "I found it behind my dresser. It must have fallen back there years ago." ... I lifted the stained cardboard cover and flipped through these pages, slightly musty, and blank except for their scaffolding of lines ... it feels good to write. I miss the quick click of my computer keys and the glow of the screen, but tonight this pen feels like Plaza wine in my hand, and already the lines that lead these words down the page seem more like the warp of our mother's loom and less like the bars I had first imagined them to be.
I never knew how much we consumed. It seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. It's no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. It's no wonder the economy collapsed, if Eva and I use so much merely to stay alive.
I was dancing across the grass, leaping and turning and running, dancing to the music of the night. I was dancing to the stars, dancing instinctively what it had taken Eva years of training to learn.
She danced a dance that sloughed off ballet like an outgrown skin and left the dance fresh and joyous and courageous. She danced with a body that had sown seeds, gathered acorns, given birth. With new and unnamed movements, she danced the dance of herself, now wild, now tender, now lumbering, now leaping. Over the rough earth she danced to the music of our burning house.
When redwoods are toppled or otherwise injured, they have a remarkable adaptation for survival. Wartlike growths of dormant buds called burls are stimulated to produce sprouts which grow from a fallen or damaged tree. It is common to see young trees formed from burls encircling an injured parent tree.
"My girls have free run of the forest and the public library. They have a mother who is around to fix them lunch and define any words they don't know. School would only get in the way of that.... It's better for my kids to stay in the woods."
"We didn't keep you out of school for all those years just to let you start now. Junior High School's one of the most toxic experiences I can imagine."
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Now the wind rises and the baby wakes. Soon we three will cross the clearing and enter the forest for good.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE * 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. Praise for Into the Forest "[A] beautifully written and often profoundly moving novel."--San Francisco Chronicle "A work of extraordinary power, insight and lyricism, Into the Forest is both an urgent warning and a passionate celebration of life and love."--Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade "From the first page, the sense of crisis and the lucid, honest voice of the . . . narrator pull the reader in. . . . A truly admirable addition to a genre defined by the very high standards of George Orwell's 1984."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Beautifully written."--Kirkus Reviews "This beautifully written story captures the essential nature of the sister bond: the fierce struggle to be true to one's own self, only to learn that true strength comes from what they are able to share together."--Carol Saline, co-author of Sisters "Jean Hegland's sense of character is firm, warm, and wise. . . . [A] fine first novel."--John Keeble, author of Yellowfish
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