The Community’s social dynamics place a similar strain on our beliefs.

She fell asleep to the exhalation of her mother’s spent breath, and to the urgency of her own thrumming heart.” The relationship between mother and daughter continues to oscillate between caring and rejection, love and hate, as Agnes matures and becomes a woman in her own right, falls in love, and begins to contemplate becoming a mother herself, a process that throws her understanding of her mother’s actions into a new light entirely. Would not let her forget that cloud of dust her mother had disappeared into…. Would not let her run to her without a care or worry or resentment. “Agnes hated that her mind would not let her curl back into her mother. Things only get more complicated after Bea returns to the Community and attempts to get back into her daughter’s good graces. Perhaps she’d never been anything but a mean mother and every kiss had been cruel, meant to eventually cause pain with its absence.” In presenting both sides of the situation, Cook asks: How can we morally balance the initial sacrifice with the later abandonment? How much are we willing to justify such a reprehensible action, considering the brutality of life in the Wilderness to which Bea was exposed? Agnes dismisses her “mean mother who had run away. When Bea can’t bear life in the Community any longer and abandons Agnes to return to the City, Cook switches from Bea’s perspective to that of Agnes, and in doing so forces us to challenge our conception of Bea from the viewpoint of the daughter she abandoned. Bea has joined the Community to save her daughter’s life, and yet Bea has entered into an existence full of cultish polyamory, grisly hunting expeditions, the consumption of raw meat, insects, and rodents, not to mention maiming and death. The emotional core of the novel-and its true source of brilliance-lies in the relationship between Bea and Agnes, the most intricate and morally arresting relationship Cook has conjured to date. A group of the most vulnerable citizens retreat to an area known as “the Wilderness” to live in a nomadic hunter-gatherer place called “the Community.” Our protagonist, Bea, decides to join the Community because her daughter Agnes is sick: If she and Agnes don’t leave the City for the Wilderness, Agnes’s death is all but assured. It takes on a future Earth so polluted that people are struggling to survive in urban society (referred to simply as “the City”).

Nature’s title suggests, Cook forces readers to question the limits of their humanity in the face of extreme circumstances-supernatural, environmental, futuristic, or a combination of the three.Ĭook’s debut novel, The New Wilderness, towers above the stories in her collection. Diane Cook centers her stories around moral conundrums like this one.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook