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Book Review of Into the Forest

Into the Forest
reviewed on + 7 more book reviews


I had this book for a long before reading it and I ended up hating it.
The book had an interesting premise which is why I bought it years ago, but when I started reading it,
I was dismayed by the Anti- Christian comments the father and sisters started expressing, but kept on reading.
Finally, with about two thirds of the book left, the sisters literally got it on.
I was so disgusted, but decided to finish as I had invested the time.
I ended up the book being even more annoyed by the sisters decision to burn down their parents slowly decaying house along with almost everything they own, and go to live in a I guess you'd call it an enclosure they'd constructed in the woods inside a big redwood stump.The enclosure was made out of salvaged tin and logs from the forest and was very small.I And this with a 6 month old baby to care for too.
I finished the book thinking that the sister Eva- who first suggested this idea had gone crazy, and Nell -the other sister had gone just as crazy for going along with it.It does say Nell chose 3 books from the house to try to educate her nephew with before the burning, but it never explained what they thought they would do when the few clothes and shoes they took with them wore out, where the baby's clothes were going to come from, how if civilization ever returned to normal the baby who could be a grown up then, would make it with what limited information they could teach him.They seemed to think they could survive just as the Pomo Indians had hundreds of years ago in the same area, but I saw an undercurrent at the end that seemed to point to the conclusion that they would end up dying.
This book had the potential to be such fine storytelling, but it was a disappointment.