Virginie DeChamplain’s lively, frank prose is a salutary bastion.
When the world collapses, under the effect of floods, heat waves and fires, two women meet in a forest that the wolves have reconquered. One has found refuge with a fellow exile in an isolated house, while the other is left with three exhausted young children to whom she wants to offer a place where they can aspire to more than just destroying themselves. Both share stories they’re not ready to tell.
On their walks through the forest, the two women are protected by a calm-minded doe who follows them wherever they go. The beast comes and goes between their shelter and the corpse clearing. She is the last of her species and knows the cataclysm that will bring about their downfall.
In the urgency of an oral, indocile language, Virginie DeChamplain imagines a feminine post-apocalypse in which the present is captured in its most subtle details: the depth of the river’s blues, the texture of the first buds, the effects of light on tree leaves.
