Holly invites Lee to join her canoeing along the subarctic Canadian Barren Lands. Entering this beautiful wilderness together, Lee witnesses Holly fall from the canoe. Forced to recover her comatose body and stand vigil as she dies, Holly recounts a number of awful experiences from her life as she attempts to come to terms with her loss and grieve the chaotic sadness of life.

The Barrens starts with an incredibly powerful sequence of Holly's accident, and Lee seeming to rescue her from the rapids. The book's marketing does state that this is a story that is recounted, so it does what it says on the tin, but personally I found the 'let me tell you this, and then that, and then this' was not as engaging a method of storytelling as the action-packed sequences involving Holly's accident. The terrifying beauty of subarctic Canada grounds the story very well, and Lee's utter powerlessness in watching a comatose Holly die and degrade were viscerally shocking. In that sense, this isn't a book for the faint of heart.

With that said, because Holly recounts experiences such as rape from such an emotional distance, I felt these aspects of the story had little emotional impact, and felt they crossed the line into shock value. Basically I felt there was too much telling and not enough showing of emotion and grief, which was a shame, because the writers can show very well. Again, this is the purpose of the novel, so it's not a criticism as such, more an explanation of why it didn't work for me personally as a reader.

Finally, this was shelved in the LGBTQIA section on NetGalley, but overall I felt disappointed by the representation of Lee's understanding and experience of her sexuality. While not every story has to be about queer joy, I did feel her sexuality was lacking adequate depth and engagement.

I am grateful to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC of The Barrens. These opinions are my own.

I really liked the way the authors seamlessly streamed together the past, the present, the hallucinating/dream/introspective future, and the real future. I liked getting to know the characters, whose thoughts, actions, and motivations drove the plot.

As a memoir, this book would be incredible. I know, because I got halfway through this book thinking it was a memoir. It is NOT a memoir, though it does it’s best to make you forget. (In its defense, it does say a “a novel” on the cover, something I somehow missed) If The Barrens had been a memoir, it would be a searing, unbelievable tale of survival. As a novel, it stumbles. The repetition in the context of a memoir would be understandable, but in a novel it’s unforgivable. Long sections of the same thing (put the body under the water, carry a canoe, eat, tell stories) can be wearing on the reader. The main character makes unbelievable choices and has a pretty hard to believe backstory. The bones of a great survival story are here, but not in the way I hoped.
Also girl? Leave that body behind. Ew.