The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

This is a book about a community of strangers attempt to live in a natural world made inhospitable by the climate crisis in this tale of survival and strife. The cataclysm of civilisation has overwhelmed all but a single natural preserve called the Wilderness State, home to the last remnants of North American wildlife, and a small band of nomads called the Community. Bea, a young mother who has made the impossible and inadvisable decision to join an experiment in the Wilderness State in order to save her little daughter, Agnes, from the wasted City, whose poisoned air has been killing her since the day she was born. She is the protagonist at first, but even that is a shifting role in this book of a different sort of Hunger Games. She is one of 20 initial volunteerswho are part of an experiment allegedly intended to determine whether humans can exist in nature without destroying it. It goes about as well as you might think, with all the usual pit falls, including hoarding, sexual predators, lies, and manipulation. all with a particular twist and well written. It is interesting to read in the midst of a pandemic, where most people do not die, but a lot of people do. Right now about one in every 500 Americans has died of COVID, and the count is continuing to rise. Here there are very few left, and as is always the case, both in real life and in post-apocalyptic fiction, there are haves and have nots. What resonates is how leadership and power end up being distributef, as well as who cares about whom. There are a lot of people who you could see kicking out of you Community because they thinkonly of themselves, and this books brings that into the ugly light that it is.