Boy's Life (Tobias Wolff) and Into the Forest (Jean Hegland)

Thesis Statement

In many ways, Nell and Eva have experienced a near-idyllic childhood, growing up miles from the nearest neighbor in the forests of northern California. Tobias Wolff electrified critics with his scarifying 1989 memoir, which many deemed as notable for its artful structure and finely wrought prose as for the events it describes.

Introduction

Jean Hegland's prose in Into the Forest is as breathtaking as one of the musty, ancient redwoods that share the woodland with Nell and Eva, two sisters who must learn to live in harmony with the northern California forest when the electricity shuts off, the phones go out, their parents die, and all civilization beyond them seems to grind to a halt. At first, the girls rely on stores of food left in their parents' pantry, but when those supplies begin to dwindle, their only option is to turn to each other and the forest's plants and animals for friendship, courage, and sustenance. Into the Forest, an apocalyptic coming-of-age story, will fill readers (both teens and adults) with a profound sense of the human spirit's strength and beauty. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Into the Forest focuses on the relationship between two teenaged sisters as they struggle to survive the collapse of society. Their father, an iconoclastic grade school principal, has decided to keep them out of school, and their mother has encouraged each of them to follow her own passions.

As a result, Eva is determined to become a ballet dancer, while her younger sister, Nell has decided she wants to matriculate at Harvard. Despite the fact that their happy world is rocked when their mother dies of cancer, they and their father are determined to carry on.

Even when society begins to crumble, spurred by terrorism, a distant war, unpredictable weather, and an unstable economy, the little family hoards its resources and attempts to keep up its spirits as they wait for the lights to come back on, the phone to ring, and the lives they have been anticipating to return to them. But when their father is killed in an accident, and a dangerous stranger arrives at their door, the girls confront the fact that they must find some new way to grow into adulthood. Into the Forest has been called both poetic and a page-turner. It is the kind of book that some readers read slowly in order to savor every sentence, and that costs other readers a night's sleep, when they find that they cannot put it down.

Eva, eighteen, and Nell, seventeen, are sisters, adolescents on the threshold of womanhood—and for them anything should be possible. But even as Eva prepares for an audition with the San Francisco Ballet and Nell dreams of her first semester at Harvard, their lives are turned upside down and their dreams are pushed into the shadows. In a nation suddenly without electricity or communications, Eva is compelled to dance alone to the ...