Small Game, by Blair Braverman

[rachelmanija]

A novel by an... I'll just copy Wikipedia here, because I can't improve on it... American adventurer, dogsled racer, musher, advice columnist and nonfiction writer. She raced and completed the 2019 Iditarod, the 1,000 mi (1,600 km) dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. Publishers Weekly called Braverman a "21st century feminist reincarnation of Jack London."

Relevantly for this book, she appeared on the survival reality show Naked and Afraid.

Small Game is about the four contestants of a reality survivor show, Civilization, who get stranded when the crew disappears without explanation.

(Spoiler for whether or not we learn why - I got accidentally spoiled for this, and I think it's better to know up-front: We never get a completely definitive explanation for why that happens, but the survivors theorize on what might have happened, and one explanation seems to clearly be the most plausible and ends up backed up by some evidence. )

Mara, the main character, was raised by paranoid survivalists and got a job teaching survival to techbros and other bros, as it's the only thing she knows. In addition to having extremely limited social experience, she's probably autistic, or at least I read her that way. She applies for the show because she's in a bad relationship and needs money to escape. Her voice and way of seeing things is very striking; while her emotional and personal horizons expand a lot during the novel, she stays her essential self.

Small Game is notable partly for what doesn't happen: it's not Lord of the Flies. The survivors don't turn on each other, and there's no rape. (In fact, the sexual danger vanishes when the crew leaves, as that removes the power dynamics based on financial control and exploitation.) There's social awkwardness, and interpersonal blowups, and emotional breakdowns, and tragedy. But there's also kindness and community and mutual support.

It's an unusually realistic take on wilderness survival, in that even supposed experts are going to really struggle to get enough calories, and weakness from hunger quickly makes even small tasks incredibly difficult. There's a lot of interesting thoughts on what survival means.

The ending is very abrupt and I'd have been pissed off if I hadn't been spoiled for the thing I spoiler-tagged, but I did like the last paragraph.

I enjoyed this a lot and recommend it, especially if you're interested in survival. Also it has a central F/F relationship that runs the gamut from sweet to unsettling to unhealthy to heartbreaking to heartwarming, with everything in between.

Content notes: Creepy sexual power dynamics involving the crew and producers; off-page power-related dubcon; an upsetting, kind of unintentional animal harm incident; lots of nature red in tooth and claw; gruesome injuries; spoiler complicated incident that's maybe mercy killing or maybe murder.

You can tell from this that this is a book that really goes for complication, fucked-up characters, and not making anything black-and-white. That's another thing I liked about it.