{"id":307412,"date":"2026-03-26T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=307412"},"modified":"2026-03-25T15:27:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T19:27:40","slug":"9-books-about-women-in-the-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/9-books-about-women-in-the-wild\/","title":{"rendered":"9 Novels About Women in the Wild"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On a fishing trip to Yellowstone National Park some years back, I was thinking more about lures than the wilderness beyond the banks of the crowded streams. Nothing felt tamer than casting into the Yellowstone River while kids swam nearby and parents shouted out cautions and calls for lunch. But one morning, as I was reeling my line in, an enormous splash almost overtopped my waders. Annoyed, I turned to see which kid had cannonballed so close to me. Staring back at me was not a rambunctious child, but the cold, threatening eye of a massive bison, just the type that park rangers had warned us to stay well away from. This bison had dunked so close I could have patted the wooly fur around its muscular neck. All at once, I was plunged into a danger I should have expected but took me completely by surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n

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My close call with the bison\u2014yes, he swam on past with that bottomless eye on me the whole time\u2014helped inspire my main character Lea Johnson\u2019s tumble into the wilds just outside her own front door. In my novel The Meaning of Fear<\/a>,<\/em> Lea, a behavioral researcher, relocates to rural Michigan in the wake of a violent attack on her husband. Despite being an expert in the fear response, Lea finds herself fearing the \u201cwilds.\u201d Sharpshooters take to the trees at night in her yard for an annual deer cull, while new friends and neighbors, and even her own husband, volunteer to help trim the herd. When a teenage trespasser on her property goes missing one night, even the local sheriff doesn\u2019t seem concerned that the young man could be lost or mistaken for a deer. Are these folks\u2019 values wildly different from hers, or is Lea out of step with a natural order she didn\u2019t realize existed on the outskirts of her beloved town?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These nine novels tell the stories of women who find themselves battling their own wilds. Some women are thrust unexpectedly into a wilderness that calls for new survival skills and instincts. Some women are escaping from brutal captivity, preferring the possibility of death to servitude. Still others find the wilds in places that seem tame. These novels bring an unsparing eye to suffering, deprivation, and grief. But these stories also celebrate the land\u2019s beauty, the joy of freedom even in the harshest places, and the revelatory sense of self that comes when a woman only has herself to depend on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n