Lauren Groff is a talented young writer with two novels and a short story collection to her credit. Her story “Delicate Edible Birds”—featured in the Best American Short Stories, and set in the migration out of Paris during the occupation in World War II—blew me away. I also saw her talk at the 2009 AWP conference in Denver. So I was eager to read Arcadia, which didn’t disappoint. Here’s a few paragraphs from my review, which ran in the Dallas Morning News:

Lauren Groff’s honed prose dazzles throughout her impressive second novel, Arcadia. But she achieves arresting originality in the beginning, when she immerses the reader in the sensory world of 5-year-old boy.

That diminutive child, known as Bit, grows up in Arcadia, a commune in the wilderness of upstate New York where the residents call themselves “The Free People.” Groff describes him turned loose in nature, grabbing an icicle for a wintry treat: “He licks it down to nothing, eating winter itself, the captured woodsmoke and sleepy hush and aching cleanness of ice.”

The novel joins Bit at four life stages — when he is 5 and the commune begins, when he is 14 and the indiscipline of the commune’s leader leads to its dissolution, when he is in his 30s, living in New York City as a single father and a photography professor, and when he’s 50, in the near future, when the world is beset by global viruses and rising sea levels.

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Book review: ‘Arcadia’ follows the captivating story of a life on a commune