The story is told in the first person by a 19-year-old English woman named Erin, who embarks on a journey to the wilderness of Alaska alone. She is testing herself, and seeking to find a woman's perspective on the "mountain man-adventurer" tradition that has shut out women for most of history.
It is a feminist quest and an investigation of what it means to leave everything behind and live in solitude. She asks the deeper questions of what "wilderness" means and what is the boundary between wild and not-wild. Where does the human element -- male or female -- fit into nature?
Along the journey, Erin engages with the voices that have inspired, goaded, confused, or just pissed her off. Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Thoreau, Isaac Newton, Einstein, and the astronauts who first went into space and to the Moon.
The ghost of Chris McCandless (Into the Wild) hovers over her journey as both cautionary tale and inspiration. The specter of the Doomsday Clock is also there. How long before we make the planet uninhabitable? Is there a way to avoid it? What has driven us to the brink of potential extinction when we have the means to save ourselves?
This is a thinking-person's novel -- it makes you engage with Erin's questions and her ruminations on serious topics, whether you agree with what she's saying or not. As an adventure tale alone, it is pretty gripping. The trek takes Erin from Iceland and Greenland across all of Canada, carpooling, couch-surfing, and hitchhiking. One of the things the novel does is show that just being a woman traveling alone is a harrowing adventure all on its own.
Andrews sprinkles in a lot of science and history fact and her nature descriptions are beautifully done. It's a unique novel and one that I think will stick with me for a long while. It's a great choice to kick off a summer of reading.
