Wildwood by Elinor Florence

Reviewed by Wendy Hawkin

I was so impressed with Florence’s historical Can Lit novel, Finding Flora (2025), I put Wildwood on my “to be read” list. I was not the only one impressed. The novel was so successful—debuting as a #1 National Bestseller in Canadian Fiction and remaining on the list for 27 consecutive weeks—Florence’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, contracted her prior work. Wildwood was originally published by Dundurn Press in 2018. The updated novel is available now, with a gorgeous cover, and is just as remarkable as Finding Flora.

This is a story of grim determination and deep love. The love between a single mother and her young daughter, as well as the love of two Irish women for the land—a great aunt and a niece who share the same name. Mary Margaret Bannister. Our broke, jobless protagonist, nicknamed Molly, is living in hot, polluted Phoenix, Arizona, with her four-year-old daughter, Bridget, when she’s notified of her great aunt’s death. According to the will, if Molly can survive a year living at Wildwood—an abandoned farmhouse without plumbing or electricity deep in the backwoods north of Edmonton—she will inherit the deed to the property.

To complicate things, wee Bridget suffers with selective mutism. She’s never spoken to anyone but Molly and is under an expensive psychiatrist’s care in Phoenix. Through research, Molly determines the 1,280 acre property is worth $1,472,000.00, and all she has to do is spend one year there. Four seasons. How hard can it be? After that, she can sell out, return to Phoenix, and purchase the help her daughter needs. What would you do?

Obviously, Molly rises to the challenge, making Wildwood a Canadian survival story and an amazing backwoods adventure. This brilliant premise alone hooked me. The novel is “jam-packed”, pun intended, with practical homesteading know-how, like living off the land with a limited budget and what to buy on monthly bulk shopping trips. Molly, the American accountant who’s used to having a paycheck, childcare, and takeout, and who’s never baked in her life, is almost too adept at this lifestyle switch. Before we know it, she’s baking bread, cookies, and berry pies in the old wood stove and putting up preserves. She’s created an elaborate laundry procedure using a scrub board and manual ringer, and they’re bathing in the kitchen tub.

The tale is enhanced by first-person writings from her great aunt’s journal. Molly discovers “a slender, unmarked volume covered with heavy, black-textured cloth” and Florence cleverly weaves these intimate, historical passages from 1924 into the story. Mary Margaret provides the homesteader’s perspective and a glimpse into harrowing, historic Alberta.

Florence, who graduated with degrees in English and journalism, is an obsessive researcher who spent eight years writing for Reader’s Digest Canada and published her own award-winning community newspaper. Her meticulous writing is flush with sensory details and is quietly spectacular. It’s a thick book—a year on an abandoned homestead offers much fodder— but is a quick and gentle, easygoing read, apart from the odd raging mama grizzly or near-death experience during a brutal Northern Alberta blizzard! I hasten to say it’s the kind of book that brings comfort—perhaps because you’re not the one having to wade through snowdrifts to dump the chamber pot in the outhouse in the dead of winter.

Florence, who’s a member of the Metis First Nation of B.C., writes a wonderful young Cree girl into the story and touches on Indigenous issues through Wynona’s circumstances. As occurred historically, it’s Wynona who helps and supports the inexperienced, naïve yet feisty, Molly as she embarks on this perilous adventure. Add to that a brush with Alberta fracking, an unscrupulous lawyer, a handsome neighbour, and you’ve got a topical, eloquent adventure. Wildwood makes a fabulous summer read.

Wildwood is published by Simon & Schuster.