Erin A Craig’s A Land So Wide is a fantasy that is partly based on traditional folk tales. Craig creates her own particular milieu in which to tell her story but one that is reminiscent of Northern Canada. The book opens with a kind of fairy tale in which a man seeks his fortune by exploiting a particular tree that he has found. He takes a community with him to the hidden bay where the tress grow but disaster strikes when they arrive and the people are left stranded.
The story of A Land So Wide picks up a few hundred years from the founding of the settlement of Mistaken. The community exists within a circle of stones that not only protects them from the deadly Bright-Eyed – the creatures of the forest – but also actively will not let them leave, painfully dragging back any inhabitant who is outside their boundary at sunset. The story revolves around Greer Mackenzie, who is in love with Ellis Beaufort, but her father is going to make her marry another. When Ellis somehow leaves the settlement as a sacrifice to the Bright-Eyed, Greer finds a way to go after him and in doing so also discovers that many of the truths that she grew up with were far from the whole story.
Craig does a lot of rapid world building in A Land So Wide, including through some strategic flashbacks. And she needs to, to make many of her twists and reveals land as they should. Because there are plenty. The whole second half of the book is a journey of discovery for Greer as she comes into a power that she had no reason to suspect that she had and learns the true history of the town of Mistaken.
A Land So Wide is a fairy-tale style fantasy novel with an engaging central character on a quest through the deep dark woods. It draws deeply on existing traditions to fashion something just slightly new but often relies a little too much on its revelations to hurtle it forward to its final reveals and confrontations.
A Land So Wide by Erin A Craig
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