Another Kind of Forest [Complete]

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

One morning, in her small cottage out in the countryside, an old woman wakes up with no memories and no name. As she stares up at the city which has appeared on her doorstep, she remembers.

The world ended.

Still, there are chickens to feed and a dead city to check out, so she gets on with it. As she explores, she finds that somebody or something is slowly piecing the world back together, but it's still broken and incomplete. Along the way, she meets two others, and together they explore the fragments of the world they once knew, all the while trying to deal with the grief of what they have lost.

This is slow burn and incredibly rough, being written for the Writathon April 2023. Cover is Midjourney,

Information

Status: Completed
Year: 2023
Author: Nettles

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.7/ 5.0
Followers: 27
Views: 18,368

Reviews

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Community Reviews(4)

Atlas Alpha 1424Royal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
The story that you wrote is pretty good friend it may be a little rough around the edges but it's quite good.
The way route these characters makes them seem more alive even though they do not know what their lives will like.
And it's fun to discover more about the characters when they discover.
DWinchesterRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Another Kind of Forest is the end of the world, as directed by Miyazaki. It's quixotic mix of slice of life and found family with just a dash of the warped world of Annihilation, and I'm okay with that. The author describes the work as rough (it is writeathon after all,) but I think when a work is this "rough," it lets the author's voice stand out in high relief before they scour away so many of those individual eccentricities in editing. That is certainly true here, and I for one hope Nettles continues to keep things a little rough.
SailWriteRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
Read for curiousity and an interesting setup.
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Intersting premise with a great start.
But like the characters in it, the fiction itself is missing something. What that is, I'm having trouble narrowing down. The closest I've gotten is a source of tension. The characters wish to find out what's happened to them and their family members and that's it.
Rat meeting up with the trio seemed to draw out very slowly while nothing of consequence happened in the background. I found myself skimming these sections instead of reading.
cucioRoyal Road
★★★★ 3.5
This is far from the usual RR fare, in a very good way. An interesting take on the post-apoc genre where a small cast of phlegmatic characters witnesses a somewhat haphazard reconstruction of reality, while comparing it to their hazy memories of how things used to be.
No big adventures, no epic hero journeys, no dramatic progression: just some quirky slice-of-life following a few nobodies trying to adapt themselves to a new, strange routine where the fabric of reality is a work in progress based on concepts and ideas, rather than physics and causality. There's also chickens, although at some point they unfortunately disappear from the story.
If you like genres like Latin-American magic realism in literature, or surrealistic anime (another reviewer mentioned Miyazaki), you might enjoy Another Kind Of Forest, give it a try.
As its author acknowledges, the story is in a rough draft state. Now that the world building, major themes and characters are fleshed out it could use a complete, very deliberate, carefully planned rewrite, rather than just editing.
Its main problem is that it meanders aimlessly, losing narrative coherency. One could chalk it as a reflection of the hazy, oneiric, unfinished nature of the world it describes, but that would be a lazy, unproductive approach. You can describe that very same kind of situation while tightening your storytelling technique, not losing the reader in meaningless ramblings throwing in ideas and then abandoning them and, for goodness sake, not forgetting your chickens altogether.
There's a wonderful book in here, the author just needs to keep digging for it. Here's hoping. Thanks a lot for sharing and good luck in your journey as a writer.