Reddit reviews Into the Forest

I"m sorry, but I don't think your pop score is a very good way to rate books. "Number of amazon reviews * average review" is going to very heavily weight your score toward more recent releases. Even if books in the 60s or 80s were 10 times better as literature (whatever that would mean), almost no one reviews those books, so their pop score would never rise above low values.

There are several amazing works of actual literature that are not on your list. Just off the top of my head I could think of Engine Summer by John Crowley or Into the Forest by Jean Hegland or The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson. Or even The Stand, by Stephen King. Or even Cloud Atlas. While on the other hand you have books like Emergence, which are absolute crap.

I guess it's maybe true that there are a lot of post-apocalyptic books being written today, but your pop score metric seems pretty pointless to me.

Nobody's mentioned Oryx and Crake yet? Seriously? It also has a sequel (more like a companion) novel, Year of the Flood and the same author wrote The Handmaid's Tale. All are beautifully crafted novels and count as "High Literature" rather than quick reads. Very readable though.

Into the Forest also has the dystopia without the YA bent, but I have some problems with that book.

Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. Back when I was a shill, I wrote this "multi-"book review of some post-apocalyptic books.

I read "Into the Forest":

>Set in the near-future, Into the Forest is a powerfully imagined novel that focuses on the relationship between two teenage sisters living alone in their Northern California forest home.

>Over 30 miles from the nearest town, and several miles away from their nearest neighbor, Nell and Eva struggle to survive as society begins to decay and collapse around them. No single event precedes society's fall. There is talk of a war overseas and upheaval in Congress, but it still comes as a shock when the electricity runs out and gas is nowhere to be found. The sisters consume the resources left in the house, waiting for the power to return. Their arrival into adulthood, however, forces them to reexamine their place in the world and their relationship to the land and each other.

I read it after seeing the trailer for the movie - if something looks interesting and it's based on a novel I always have to read the book first! It definitely passes the Bechdel, also it's written by a woman. Not sure it lives up to all the hype, but it's a fluffy easy read and a decent page turner.

someone just posted a similar question on /r/books, so I'll just copy/paste what I wrote there.

1. Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. It's set in the immediate aftermath of an unnamed apocalypse and concerns two sisters and their father living off the land in their mountain home. It's about survival and relationships and trying to remain whole. This is how you should write about teenagers in the post-apocalypse. It has all the angst and anxieties and stubbornness and adds sympathy and a realism that I found lacking in other like-minded books.
   
   
2. Head Off and Split by Nikky Finney. It's just a brilliant collection of poetry. I constantly recommend it at work. There are plenty of videos on youtube of her reading, here's Penguin Mullet Bread. It won the national book award in 2011, here's her brilliant acceptance speech which is pure joy.
   
   
3. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. This is a tough, gritty book about a family of extreme poverty and a hurricane that is about to bear down on them. Has some of the most harrowing writing I've encountered, and it is so evocative and so fucking vivid, I felt like I was in the hurricane with them. There is a surprising amount of dog-fighting in the book but overall outstanding. Also won the national book award in 2012.