When a young servant girl escapes a colonial settlement in 17th century Virginia, her life is saved while her struggle to survive begins. Lauren Groff's The Vaster Wilds is a window into one soul's effort to square the beauty and awe of the natural world and the existence of a god that would allow the sheer blight and destruction the english colonizers inflict. Zed's will to live coupled with her crisis of faith is absolutely gorgeously conveyed with breath-taking prose.