This is Michael Maxwell with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I am recommending The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy, a book that is a compelling candidate for the “Great Millennial Novel”.
I had to read The Wilderness slowly, almost in bits and pieces, because it’s filled with these little profundities that deliver the sweet pain of poking a bruise. Parts of this book cut so deeply for me that I had to put it down and stare off into the middle distance. Angela Flournoy introduces readers to a cast of five friends, all Millennials, as they cross the country and come back together over the course of two decades. It’s been called an “era-defining” book, and it does not take long to understand why.
If you’re like me, you’ve felt an abstract sense of loss since the pandemic as if something has gone missing, but you’ve forgotten exactly what that something is. The characters in The Wilderness grapple with this feeling, and Flournoy depicts the richness of their interior lives with such reality as to almost feel therapeutic for readers who see themselves in this story. This book is an ode to friendships that expand and contract, shifting as friends move to new cities, get new jobs, and as adulthood sinks its claws into the rhythms of their everyday lives.
Flournoy has crafted a lived-in tribute to an underrated form of love, and this novel will be one future readers can turn to in order to feel what living through our age was like.
Check out The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy at the Sioux City Public Library today!
Support for Check It Out on Siouxland Public Media comes from Avery Brothers.