Debut Reviews: THE NEW WILDERNESS by Diane Cook & SIN EATERS by Caleb Tankersly

Debut fiction in teal and crimson…

Debut novel THE NEW WILDERNESS by Diane Cook, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, is speculative fiction at its best: a exceptionally beautiful and brutally honest warning about the near future.

Bea and her nine-year-old daughter Agnes have survived in the last Wilderness State going on four years. They are part of a research study on whether humans can still live in nature as they once did. In this dystopian age, people either live in the smog-filled residential City, or they live and work in industrial territories like the Mines. The Wilderness State is all that is left of wild habitat with breathable air. There were twenty subjects in the beginning of the study, living as a nomadic tribe. Over four years, half have perished in the wilderness. Survival against predators, starvation, and the elements are not their only concern. Government Rangers that enforce strict rules are losing interest in the research study. Their uniforms change as governing Administrations change. They send the tribe on journeys that become more and more perilous. Bea and Agnes have a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship that manages to survive, as they do, despite the mounting odds.

Cook received a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She visited ancestral lands and researched the traditions, foodways, and skills of Northern Paiute, Shoshone, Ute, Klamath, Modoc, Molala, Bannock, and Washoe tribes. The investment in this novel is evident from beginning to end. It’s a stunning debut.

Debut story collection SIN EATERS by Caleb Tankersly, winner of the 2021 Permafrost Prize, features a colorful assortment of characters that are flawed, self-destructive, and wholly empathetic to the audience. Their families and hometowns use conflicted feelings of love, familiarity, religion, and sex to tempt like a baited trap. Whether protagonists take the shape of a righteous pastor in a plastic Roman centurion costume at a shopping mall, a ghost of a murdered child, or a man losing his beloved wife to multiple sclerosis—the reader will be touched by their plight and pull for them as they struggle in an imperfect world.

Strong debuts in teal and crimson