REVIVING ARTEMIS

A Vermont woman communes with nature to discover her inner self in this memoir.

Luskin recalls how, before she started visiting the woods of Vermont in her 50s, she’d spent most of her life in the familiar suburban world that many of her readers currently inhabit: “In adolescence, I read nineteenth-century novels about lonely girls, pursued literature in college, and learned geographical navigation on Manhattan’s signposted grid,” she writes. “From literature, I learned to read human behavior, but I didn’t know how to read the land.” At the age of 60, she realized she no longer had to stick to safe and narrow paths, and she decided to venture into the wilderness to hunt deer with a rifle. She devotes much of her book to an account of her earlier life, including her warm relationship with her father—an outstandingly memorable figure in the book’s narrative whose demise is one of the most moving moments in this book. She also tells of sexual abuse by another family member, about which she long remained silent. These autobiographical reflections build to the memoir’s turning point, in which Luskin discarded many aspects of her conventional existence as a teacher and embraced a woodswoman’s life of nature and hunting. In strong, empathetic prose, her narrative emphasizes this transformation, in which, she says, she saw herself as embracing her inner Artemis—the Ancient Greek goddess of the hunt. The book makes predictable references to Vermont’s “robust hunting tradition” and the concept of wildlife “management,” although much of the narrative seems to come down to a simple desire to hunt: “I initially turned to deer hunting to educate myself in the way of the woods,” she writes, “but this year, just days before opening day [of hunting season], I came down with buck fever: All I wanted to do was shoot a deer.” Overall, the work is likely to appeal most to fellow hunters, who will find Luskin’s memoir a highly identifiable read.

A lyrical, spiritual story of a woman making a change later in life.