The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
Published 2020 · 275 pages · 109,614 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Science Fiction
How hard is The New Wilderness to read?
The New Wilderness scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Cook writes in clear, present-tense prose that captures the vocabulary of survival and bureaucracy. The language is accessible, with the strangeness emerging from the rules and rituals of this imagined future.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Sentences are often declarative and observational, building through accumulated detail of how the Community lives. Cook's prose has the flatness of someone recording survival without melodrama.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- The novel explores climate crisis, motherhood, and what we sacrifice for survival through a family in a protected wilderness. The relationship between Bea and her daughter Agnes becomes a study in how extremity transforms bonds.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Post-climate-collapse society, wilderness survival, and the textures of nomadic life layer through the narrative. Cook builds her world through accumulated attention to rules, food, and the small negotiations of group living.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- The alternating perspectives of mother and daughter reveal different understandings of their situation. The reader must track how each sees the Wilderness and their relationship, watching them grow apart.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The Wilderness becomes symbolic of both freedom and confinement. The Post becomes symbolic of civilization's reach even into protected spaces. Agnes's growth becomes symbolic of adaptation that costs something essential.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Cook maintains observational distance from her characters' choices without judging them. The novel is matter-of-fact about survival's costs, neither celebrating nor condemning what people do to endure.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Bea and Agnes's fates diverge; the Wilderness continues. Cook offers the consequences of adaptation without suggesting any choice was clearly right or wrong.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- The novel alternates between Bea and Agnes's perspectives across time. The structure is accessible, building toward the divergence that their different adaptations produce.
How The New Wilderness is regarded
The New Wilderness holds a literary regard score of 42 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.