In a besieged and starving colonial settlement, a girl flees the fort after the death of her young charge. With hardly anything in her bag, she tries to survive in the vast wilderness. Using her wits, she journeys into the unknown while reexamining her own beliefs about nature, the natives, and God's plan.

To be frank, The Vaster Wilds is a plotless story about a girl slowly dying in the wilderness. Full of descriptions of nature, the tale mostly focuses on the unnamed narrator's cogitations on the nature of religion and appreciation for the wild, with some flashbacks to the history of violence she's witnessed sprinkled in. For such a short book, it was surprisingly hard to get through, plodding along in a fashion that some think is beautiful, but I find deathly boring.