“Unlike many postholocaust stories that offer Huck Finns wandering the wasteland, this charming, unpretentious novel delves into a different form of the pastoral, modeling itself on Thoreauvian attention to a person’s place and moral actions in the spheres of nature, society, intellect and the like….This is an auspicious debut.” -   Peggy Kaganoff in Publishers Weekly

"I have averaged about a book a week for the past thirty years or so. I also am in three writegroups, and know the difference between poor literature and excellent literature. This book starts out with a fairly generic descriptive scene that I immediately mentally suggested be chopped down from five to two paragraphs, so I thought, Uh-oh, I'm in edit mode, page one. Surprisingly, it was nothing but A+ material from page two onward. With only minor reservations, I found the prose to be top 5% material. At times they were just plain beautiful and worth repeating. Where has this author gone? Is this her only book? The world suffers for want of more. A million hacks, and this gem is a one-hit wonder. It saddens me. The book is about a girl who has come to live with her aunt after the splintering or post-war America. She becomes a gatherer who trades herbs, roots and bark for goods. The world-building of isolated and land based living is incredibly detailed and down to earth. I wanted to mark all of the information down, just in case. Threats seem all around, and sometimes touching their lives, but the world has grown large since so many people have passed on. From there it's a wonderful remake of Beauty and the Beast. I loved it. The girl made the right choice. I loved that too. The best thing a person can write about a book is that reading it is a pleasure so intense that you don't care a whole lot about the plot. That's what I'm telling you. Reading the last period is reading a sense of loss."  -    By Gary Wedlund

Neena Gathering pops up occasionally on Brazilian websites. The novel was translated into Portuguese as The Lost World, which leads to interesting conjunctions with Crichton and Doyle....  

"Também gostoso de ler é Mundo Perdido, de Valerie Nieman Colander, outro mundo pós-apocalipse; e, pra não dizer que não cito autores homens nesse subgênero, vou de Dean Koontz com O Guardião e Sr. Assassino - sendo o primeiro, para mim, uma pequena obra-prima."

(Also fun to read is The Lost World, by Valerie Nieman Colander, another post-apocalyptic world, and, not to say that I do not mention male authors in this subgenre, I'm Dean Koontz with The Guardian and Mr. Assassin - the first for me , a small masterpiece.)