Into The Forest follows teen sisters Eva and Nell in the not-so-distant future as they forage through the forest that surrounds their rural home following the collapse of society. Jean was honored and delighted to learn that a new bookstore in Auvergne has been named Dans la forêt after her novel. The French edition, translated by Josette Chicheportiche and published by Editions Gallmeister in January of 2017, sold over 200,000 copies in less than five years and was awarded a number of literary prizes, including Le Prix de l’Union Interallié, Le Prix des lecteurs du pays de Mortagne, and Le Prix du Marais. Into the Forest has been chosen for a number of college and city-wide reading programs and translated into over a dozen languages, most recently Swedish, Korean, Dutch, and French. 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. Intended more a metaphor or a fable than a prediction, warning, or how-to guide, Into the Forest has been called both poetic and a page-turner. 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.Set in the northern Californian forest in the near-future, Into the Forest focuses on the relationship between two isolated teenaged sisters as they struggle to survive the collapse of society. The plot draws readers along at the same time that the details and vivid writing encourage rereading. Flashbacks smartly create a portrait of the lost family: an iconoclastic father, artistic mother and two independent daughters. 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. 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. In Northern California, 32 miles from the closest town, two orphaned teenage sisters ration a dwindling supply of tea bags and infested cornmeal. The tale is set in the near future: electricity has failed, mail delivery has stopped and looting and violence have destroyed civil order. 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.
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