This is my favorite book of the year. I am a mother of two sons who are individuals in their own right. It spoke to me about motherhood and the love we have for our children.
I was also delighted because I spent a summer not far from the setting of the book, the wilderness in the Canadian Coastal Range. It is a wonderful read.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
The author’s son left home at sixteen and, by the time Feenie Ziner’s chronicle begins seven years later, he had settled into a solitary life in the untracked Canadian wilderness, three thousand miles from home. “Ben was on perfectly safe ground when he asked me to come out to British Columbia to see where he was living. Any kid who had gone to the trouble of putting a whole continent between himself and his family could count on their never showing up at his doorstep.” Any mother who would make the trip—a transcontinental flight, a six-hour bus ride to the end of the line, then a journey by bush plane into a densely forested nowhere—is clearly a force to be reckoned with, and the reckoning between parent and child that Within This Wilderness witnesses takes on, because of its remote setting, an archetypal resonance. Indeed, both the awesome natural charms of the surroundings and the hard manner of living that isolation dictates engage and even relax our attention, protecting us for a time from the climate of deep emotion in which the protagonists dwell. Ziner’s deft portrayal of the elaborate, often comic diplomacy of the relations between parents and grown children, her sensitivity to the alarming innocence of the toughest youth, and her splendid writing reward the reader throughout, and her unstinting appraisal of her own noble confusion—a spell of love, worry, wonder, guilt, loss, pride, anxiety, anger, obligation, yearning—is both moving and magnanimous.
