Brisk, feminist, contemplative first novel about the end of contemporary civilization and the survival of two sisters. Hegland is vague about civilization’s downfall. She places a wife, a husband, and their two daughters, Eva and Nell, on 50 acres of second-growth redwood forest in northern California—the idea seeming to be that since the location is remote to begin with, news of the outside world would filter in slowly. There’s a war somewhere, and ever more virulent strains of viruses rage through the population; then, suddenly, there’s no more food available in stores, no more gasoline, no more television. The mother dies; the father pushes his dreamy daughters to learn such humble skills as gardening and canning. In the best scene, the father’s chain saw kicks back and cuts him, and his daughters are helpless, unable to do more than watch as he bleeds to death. They bury him where he lies. Slowly, because the alternative is starvation, Nell learns the wisdom of the forest: killing a wild sow with a rifle she barely knows how to fire, using herbs for medicines and tea, gathering acorns to pound into flour. A boy comes to take Nell away, but she cannot leave Eva; though sisters by birth, Hegland turns the girls into lovers—and ideologically pure lovers, at that. Mystically, they both produce milk to nurse Eva’s son, the product of a rape by a passing thug. Fearful of more such violence, the sisters burn down their father’s house and take up housekeeping in a mammoth redwood stump. They’ve learned nature’s lessons and, purified, are prepared for humankind’s great destiny: to live in the woods like animals. A little apocalypse goes a long way. Beautifully written, however, and Hegland’s knowledge of organic gardening, fruit drying, etc., is impeccably authentic.

—Kirkus Reviews

Hegland’s powerfully imagined first novel will make readers thankful for telephones and CD players while it underscores the vulnerability of lives dependent on technology. The tale is set in the near future: electricity has failed, mail delivery has stopped and looting and violence have destroyed civil order. In Northern California, 32 miles from the closest town, two orphaned teenage sisters ration a dwindling supply of tea bags and infested cornmeal. They remember their mother’s warnings about the nearby forest, but as the crisis deepens, bears and wild pigs start to seem less dangerous than humans. From the first page, the sense of crisis and the lucid, honest voice of the 17-year-old narrator pull the reader in, and the fight for survival adds an urgent edge to her coming-of-age story. Flashbacks smartly create a portrait of the lost family: an iconoclastic father, artistic mother and two independent daughters. The plot draws readers along at the same time that the details and vivid writing encourage rereading. Eating a hot dog starts with “the pillowy give of the bun,” and the winter rains are “great silver needles stitching the dull sky to the sodden earth.” If sometimes the lyricism goes a little too far, this is still a truly admirable addition to a genre defined by the very high standards of George Orwell’s 1984 and Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker.

—Publishers Weekly

Nell and Eva are two young sisters who are not quite women but no longer children. During the delicate years of teenage emotional and physical maturity, the world around them collapses from economic failure and the sisters find themselves completely isolated from civilization.

Nell is the younger of the two and has been struggling with losing the close relationship with her sister when Eva finds an obsessive passion for dancing. They live with their parents in the last home on a rural road, miles away from town. Although the girls are home-schooled, they venture weekly into town with their father and forge new and exciting friendships with local teenagers in the town square.

Shortly after their mother passes away from cancer, signs of an economic collapse begin to emerge with regular power outages, gas shortages and constant news of war, plagues and rioting on the radio and television. Eventually, the power turns off and never comes back on. With no gas for the truck, the girls and their father are unable to return to town and the girls lose the connections they had made over the summer.

Using food harvested from their garden, they are able to can and store a good amount of food to last through a winter. Both of the girls believe with all of their heart that everything will return to normal soon. Nell will be able to go to Harvard and so she continues to study by candlelight, reading each and every entry in the family’s collection of encyclopedias. Eva continues to dance without music, convinced that once order is restored she will join a dance troupe in a big city.

Their dreams come to a close when their father is fatally wounded in the woods while felling trees. The girls are alone with no one to guide them or give them hope. Yet they cling to what little strength they have left and dare to keep their dreams alive.

After Nell almost leaves her sister to follow the dream of her boyfriend who shows up months later at her door, and after Eva is brutally raped by a stranger, the girls slowly succumb to the realization that things are not going to change. They need to take drastic steps to take care of themselves and forget their dreams. Nell lets go of her childish crush and Eva stops dancing. Together they work the land, learn about the forest and what it can provide for them and store food for the winter.

After Eva’s baby comes, the result of her painful rape, the girls decide to take one last step. They burn their home and move to the forest where they feel comfortable.

I really enjoyed the ending because I understood it. I don’t think I would have been able to burn the house down because it offered protection and it also contained things they could use. But the sisters saw the house as something holding them back, preventing them from moving on. It was the last thing which kept them tethered to the dreams of old, the dreams which would never come to fruition.

With the house gone, they could let go of their old hopes and dreams and were free to create new ones. The house also made them targets to looters and rapists and so the destruction of their home was a form of protection, both physically and emotionally.

Into the Forest can be seen not only as a coming of age story but as a very relevant book as far as the economic crisis is concerned. This is a plausible event which could happen, especially in today’s eerily similar circumstances. The book was written in 1998 almost as if the author could sense what was to come. The book succeeded in making me cringe with fear and foreboding!

I enjoyed this book and would read something else by the author in a heartbeat.

—Rebecca Skane, Seacoast Online

This beautifully written and often profoundly moving novel by gets mired early in a murderously sluggish pace as patient readers wait for something to happen.

We don’t mind at first because so much has already happened to the two sisters: Nell, 17, who narrates “Into the Forest” by keeping a “chronicle of this time” on one of the few remaining pieces of notebook paper in the area, and Eva, 18, a gifted ballet dancer who practices to a metronome because there is no electricity.

Somewhere in the near future, a dozen miles outside a town like Cloverdale or Red Bluff or Redding (it’s called “Redwood” in the book), the two sisters try to carry on with life in their family cabin, gradually realizing that the worst has happened.

Electricity sputtered to a halt long ago, as did telephone service and running water. Mail delivery also slowed to a stop. Banks and businesses in town closed. Planes stopped flying. Stores were looted and abandoned. Gas became invaluable, as did antibiotics, plastic bags, working batteries and dependable (not rumored) word from “the outside.”

If it all sounds too outlandish Northern California writer Jean Hegland and fictional to be possible, Nell recalls “how quickly everyone adapted” in another time, when “people beyond our forest” learned how “to drink bottled water, drive on overcrowded freeways and deal with the automated voices that answered almost every telephone. Then, too, they cursed and complained, and soon adjusted, almost forgetting their lives had ever been any other way.”

But now, everyone knows something is really wrong — even before batteries ran out of energy and radios sputtered news of a vague, distant war “taking place to protect freedoms, to defend a way of life the politicians promised,” writes Nell. “Some people said it was that war that caused the breakdown.”

“Breakdown” is a nice word for what’s going on. Word has come to Redwood that the war never ended; the overseas currency market has failed; a paramilitary group has bombed the Golden Gate Bridge; an earthquake has caused meltdown in one of California’s nuclear reactors; overuse of pesticide has ruined farmlands; the ozone is full of holes; welfare has crumbled; schoolchildren are shooting each other; and outbreaks of once-curable disease (strep, meningitis) are killing multitudes.

At the cabin where Nell and Eva’s mother gave them an excellent home-school education before her death from cancer, and where their father died in a chain-saw accident while trying to “make do,” the two sisters struggle to shore up the life they once took for granted. “I remember emptying wastebaskets that would seem like fortunes now,” says Nell, “baskets filled with cardboard cores of toilet paper rolls, with used tissues, broken pencils, twisted paper clips, sheets of crumpled notebook paper and empty plastic bags.” This is where the story bogs down. Aside from preserving the past, meeting an unexpected visitor or two and considering rumors that civilization has returned elsewhere, they experience nothing but worry and longing, grief for their parents and the vagaries of a make-do life. As Eva dances compulsively “to the dead, ungiving rhythm of the metronome . . . her dancing finer than ever,” Nell compulsively reads the encyclopedia, her only way to study for an entrance exam that one day, when the “breakdown” ends, will admit her to Harvard.

We do find it intriguing that when Nell gets to the word “amnesia,” she learns that during prolonged loss of memory, amnesiacs may enter a “fugue state” — a new life unrelated to the previous one. Nell looks out at the empty yard and thinks, “This is our fugue state — the lost time between the two halves of our real lives.” That, we realize as the pace gradually quickens, is what this exquisitely conceived book is all about.

Somewhere “out there,” destiny awaits everyone; wholeness is for those who choose not to forget what is deeply, possibly human. To watch Nell and Eva use the current “breakdown” to move toward a chosen future is to understand the depth and great importance of Hegland’s message. After all, readers of this book, as Nell points out, are adjusting to the first stages of the “breakdown” already.

—Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle