The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

The author has once again set a fictional story in the midst of an historical event. As is her fashion in writing, we are plunked down into the action, and the rest of the story unfolds piecemeal across the story. The setting is the doomed settlement of Jamestown, Va. at the start of the 17th century. Our heroine, a young servant girl, has slipped out of the fort where her English companions are starving, freezing and suffering from smallpox — or already dead. She chose to flee and left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known. The reasons beyond this for her flight are pretty consistent with the situation many young servants faced in the homes of what were essentially their masters. On so many levels they were not at all safe there, and it was a situation that encouraged malevolence rather than prevent it. So while the girl has fled with nothing and no one, and the wilderness is not safe or forgiving either, the reader is left to contemplate what fate is the harder to survive.