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INFORMATION ABOUT THIS BOOK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 15, 2025
Format:  Hardcover,  paperback, audiobook, and ebook
Print length ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
Genre:  Literary Fiction

WHY I CHOSE THIS BOOK?

I have been curious about this book since it was published and was all the hype. It was recommended by several booktubers and through Instabook, but I never got hold of it in the Library. A few weeks ago, I got the opportunity to get this book on sale, and I finally got the time to read it.

MY PERSONAL OPINION OF “THE WILDERNESS”

I have been curious about this book since it was published and was all the hype. It was recommended by several booktubers and through Instabook, but I never got hold of it in the Library. A few weeks ago, I got the opportunity to get this book on sale, and I finally got the time to read it.

I truly enjoyed this book. The characters were exquisite in their unique personalities and life stories. Desiree, January, Nakia, and Monique were unique and special; through their individual strengths and characters, they merged in a beautiful friendship that transcended heartbreak, financial uncertainty, social discrimination, and human rights activism.

The book goes back and forth, from past to future, giving us the full picture of how their friendship got shaped and also how their individual lifestyle unravel through family, pain, and love. It is a beautiful, thought-provoking, emotionally powerful narration of how friendship can shape our lives if we give in to its power.

It was a great read and fulfilled all the recommendations and accolades the book earned.

PREMISE OF THE BOOK AS FOUND IN AMAZON / GOODREADS:

Desiree, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

Desiree is estranged from her sister Danielle, and the two nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

MY RATING: 4.5

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANGELA FLOURNOY is the author of The Wilderness. Her debut novel, The Turner House, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel won the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an NAACP Image Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker. 

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The New School, Columbia University, Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles. She is a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. 

Flournoy has received fellowships from the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin. She was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father from Detroit.

Bibliography:

• The Turner House
• The Wilderness