Rating: 
Summary: Make sure you have enough time to finish this book quickly!
Review: This northern California story is a gripping one, especially for those living in the area. The author writes with a style that is believeable and engaging. She weaves a tale that is much more frightening than any sci fi could be. The events she relates are too real to be ignored! Intelligently written, thoughtfully concieved, good character development, and just a plain good read. Take it on vacation
Rating: 
Summary: Preserve Knowledge and Nature
Review: This is a wonderful book. I am not prone to crying while reading a novel, but Hegland brings the characters so close to you, that I felt I was suffering with them. This is a novel that encourages you to preserve and cherish the natural world ...including yourself and your loved ones. And it reminds you that we are certainly overlooking the really beautiful and fundamental gifts from nature to grab at unnecessary things in this so-called civilization in which we live. This novel makes you want to turn inward, disconnect your phone, and absorb all the preserved knowledge that you can ingest. It made me want to fast on 'white tea' ... just to remind myself. And it reminds the reader that nations can come and go, but mankind is much stronger and far more beautiful when pressed to accept his true nature. For instance, Eva's civilized and refined dancer's stamina pales and appears weak in comparison to her endurance of pain during childbirth. As Eva groans against the violent pain, Nell thinks ... "They are sounds that move the earth, the sounds that give voice to the deep, violent fissures in the bark of the redwoods. They are the sounds of splitting cells, of bonding atoms, the sounds of the waxing moon and the forming stars".I don't think readers should get caught up in the 'feminist' aspect or the 'plausibility of plot' concept. I think that even a man could see himself through Nell's view of the world. And I believe that the framework of the plot just serves as a springboard for exploring the human experience in a certain light. I hated to finish the book because I felt that I was losing a friend or at least moving away from home. Beautiful work!
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing after a wonderful beginning
Review: The books starts off strong: interesting premise, good characters, well-written. Then, about halfway through, it gets weird and out of character and tedious. The end of the book made no sense at all; the final action is childish and immature, everything the girls proved they weren't as they survived. Maybe it was to show they are still children, despite everything that happened. There's also one "scene" between the girls that is disturbing and didn't really seem necessary, like it was written only for titillation. Anyway, it's a decent read, but not on par with Atwood.
Rating: 
Summary: Last chapter kills what was an exceptional book.
Review: This was a solid 4 until the last chapter. The ending was so incredibly hokey I groaned out loud while reading it. A total copout and an insult to the characters, not to mention the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Explore Into The Forest
Review: This is a tale of being at the end of the road, isolated from the main stream of society, and then the breakdown of society as we know it.
A story about two sisters who are home schooled and live in the redwood forest with their parents. The story takes these sisters through the loss of their mother, the society that we all know, the waiting to return to normal, and the efforts they make to survive.
An increadible story that is hard to put down. I listened to this book on tape, and the narrator adds alot to the story through pauses in all the right places. I would recommend the audio version.
Rating:
Summary: Could it happen?
Review: With 102 previous reviews, there's not much I can add about this book. I agree with the majority of reviewers that it is a good read. I found it very engaging.
A few reviewers downgraded the book because they found the premise (collapse of our economy) to be implausible. Another reviewer I think properly stated that you don't need to find it plausible for the book to work. Its fiction - accept the premise and enjoy the book, or move on.
But I personally find the premise quite plausible. Our economy is dependent on oil. Every year we have about 80 million more humans on earth and about 30 billion fewer barrels of oil. Modern agriculture has been described as using soil to convert oil into food. It takes about a kilogram of oil to produce a kilogram of wheat.
Oil is finite. Accordingly, oil production is oil depletion. Global oil production will inevitably peak and begin to decline. The question is when. Predictions of declining oil are nearly as old as the petroleum era and have been proven wrong repeatedly. But one guy got it right. In 1956, an oil geologist named M. King Hubbert predicted that American oil production would peak around 1970. He was widely derided for this pessimistic projection until 1970 when U.S. oil production peaked right on schedule. People using his methods today predict that global oil production will peak around 2008.
Global oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s, and oil production has exceeded oil discoveries since 1980. Recent price rises reflect the fact that we no longer have excess capacity. Everybody is pumping full out, and if anything knocks off production anywhere, the price goes up. A strike in Nigeria, a bomb in Iraq, a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico - with no swing producer to pick up the slack, price is the mechanism that balances the equation. See www.peakoil.net, or google peak oil, oil depletion or Hubbert's curve for more info.
But the book is premised on a fairly quick near total loss of oil. This seems unlikely, but again it could happen under various scenarios. Shortly after peak oil is reached we could have wars to control whats left. As Iraq has hinted, such wars can result in production stopping. Or perhaps the war would leave oil production intact, but cut off tanker traffic out of the Arabian Gulf, leaving pipelines to Europe and America left to fend for ourself.
Another possibility is that shortly after peak oil hits, oil exporting nations will choose to export less to make their supply last, or to use their declining oil to support there own economy, causing the supply available to us to fall faster than depletion alone would cause. Note that the North Sea oil production has been falling by over 7% a year since passing peak, so depletion alone can be quite a kick in the pants.
None of this is to say that the collapse scenario set forth in "Into the Forest" is inevitable. But the longer we maintain our shortsighted energy policy and unsustainable consumerism, the more likely this scenario becomes.
Reading this book helped me to visualize this scenario - put flesh and bones into the graphs and charts that lay out a possible future. One reviewer pointed out that she lives in a city and doesn't have hundreds of acres to grow corn, gather acorns or shoot hogs in, making this a depressing read for her. All the more reason to challenge our unsustainable path while we still have time to set a new course. This book can be read as a wake up call instead of just good fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Wow
Review: I'm a big fan of post holocaust fiction. I've read hundreds of stories over the past 40 years about Life after Doomsday. This is absolutely one of the best. It avoids the common assumptions of the genre. There is no sudden and dramatic change in the lives of the two young protagonists. There isn't an immediate awareness on the part of the community that something awful and terrifying is occurring. People don't suddenly go berserk. Marauding gangs of psychopaths don't appear out of nowhere to prey upon the vulnerability of their fellow citizens. Every character, every behavior, every reaction is believable and easily explained within the context of known human behavior. Everyone initially clings desperately to the belief that things haven't really changed, that the situation isn't that bad, that tomorrow, things will all return to normal. It's just a matter of holding on and continuing with their daily routines. Their fingers have to be pried, one by one, from this sad hope.
Hegland's placing of Nell and her sister Eva in a forest, far from the nearest town, was a brilliant device on many levels. Normally, doomsday writers place their protagonists right in the thick of things. They trap them in cities or situations where they can inflict upon them every supposedly predictable terror of life after the collapse, showing us clearly frightened people in clearly frightening times.
But Nell and Eva live in a quiet forest. The forest isn't just a location here. It's not there just to show us the girls' gardening skills or how to live a self-sufficient life. The forest is a major, living, breathing protagonist. Hegland renders it's character brilliantly. It is both serene and tumultuous, comforting and menancing, fiercely protective and neglectful. Placing Nell and her sister in this quiet, slow environment creates a constant sense of dread and tension in the story - what unknowable things are going on outside this ageless, unjudgmental sanctuary? What horrors are taking place? Are cities burning? Has the law of the jungle replaced the fragile contracts between people? Is inescapable death slowing overtaking mankind? Are all the horrors imaginable about to invade this oasis of calm, and when and how will they come? The little intrusions of the outside world that do occur are more terrifying as a result. The forest doesn't protect Nell and Eva from evil. It wrecks no havoc on transgressors, it passes no judgments, it doesn't change or adapt. "Bring it on" it seems to say. "I will not be changed. I will simply out last you, neutralize you with my steadfastness, absord your impact and accept it as part of my nature."
The forest is a sort of allegory for the the human spirit. Primieval, indestructable and unchanging, it survives despite the modern mistakes of humankind.
I disagree strongly with the reviewer who says this is not an inspirational story. It is a story filled with hope and promise. Strip away the false values, the intellectualism, the materialism and the intolerance that are so much a part of the modern human's psyche, and you are left with what got us this far to begin with, and what will save us in the end - a sense of beauty, perseverance, tolerance and acceptance of the world as it is.
It's a beautiful, poetically written story, and well worth a place on anyone's bookshelf.
Rating:
Summary: frightening but not inspiring
Review: I read this book during the summer when I was living in Northern California and we were having the "electricity crisis." So understandably, it seemed frighteningly plausible to me. I have no trouble with the premise. And I enjoyed the writing and the development of the relationship between the two girls.
But I was unable to find this book inspiring, for the simple reason that these girls, despite their dire situation, have advantages that most Americans will never have. Conveniently, they already live more or less "off the grid," in a house surrounded by woods and nature's bounty. Their father has taught them the virtue and the skills of self-sufficiency. Their mother, conveniently, was an expert herbalist who, even more conveniently, left behind a house full of reference books. And finally, they live in Northern California, where winters and summers are mild and it is actually possible to live in a tree stump for awhile.
These factors may have helped them survive, but I live in a city, on the grid, in a climate where nothing grows for several months a year. So the book felt to me more like an explanation of why, when the crisis comes, I'll be one of the first to perish. What's inspiring about that?
Rating:
Summary: Preserve Knowledge and Nature
Review: This is a wonderful book. I am not prone to crying while reading a novel, but Hegland brings the characters so close to you, that I felt I was suffering with them. This is a novel that encourages you to preserve and cherish the natural world ...including yourself and your loved ones. And it reminds you that we are certainly overlooking the really beautiful and fundamental gifts from nature to grab at unnecessary things in this so-called civilization in which we live. This novel makes you want to turn inward, disconnect your phone, and absorb all the preserved knowledge that you can ingest. It made me want to fast on `white tea' ... just to remind myself. And it reminds the reader that nations can come and go, but mankind is much stronger and far more beautiful when pressed to accept his true nature. For instance, Eva's civilized and refined dancer's stamina pales and appears weak in comparison to her endurance of pain during childbirth. As Eva groans against the violent pain, Nell thinks ... "They are sounds that move the earth, the sounds that give voice to the deep, violent fissures in the bark of the redwoods. They are the sounds of splitting cells, of bonding atoms, the sounds of the waxing moon and the forming stars". I don't think readers should get caught up in the 'feminist' aspect or the 'plausibility of plot' concept. I think that even a man could see himself through Nell's view of the world. And I believe that the framework of the plot just serves as a springboard for exploring the human experience in a certain light. I hated to finish the book because I felt that I was losing a friend or at least moving away from home. Beautiful work!
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