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All Dystopian Fiction Coverage

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The two institutions in which I spent the most time as a child in Lexington, Kentucky, were the library and the church. The library was a small local branch at which, every Saturday, I’d check out my limit of 20 books. These I devoured alongside bags of misshapen apples on sale at the store. The church offered free childcare in the form of Bible School. Sessions began with the Old Testament and ended with the Pringles I wasn’t allowed at home.

Both spaces fed the same fundamental need. I have always been a glutton for wonder. On the page, in the pew, I would sometimes experience a glorious expansion of my self beyond my body. I was equally moved to tears by the scene of a mouse warrior sacrificing himself in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series and a hymn about God so loving the little children that he gave up his only son. Both experiences ignited a physical charge: a tingling, a surge of heat and awe. I felt it in my body.

***

A few years later, I lost religion. I continued to reread the Old Testament long after giving up prayer. By then my family had moved to California. Under that terrifying expanse of Western sky, I anchored myself in the old story of the world as a place infused with meaning, wonder, flashes of justice and grace. The syntax of the King James translation is brutal and beautiful; I suspect that it moves beneath my prose, invisible yet substantial, bones beneath the skin.

Having lost God, I kept reading. I was still young enough to do so indiscriminately, omnivorously. John Steinbeck’s California, with its sweeping timescales and pitiless cycles of good and evil, strummed a chord of near-Biblical majesty. The Animorphs series’ interstellar battles writ large the dilemma of being a moral creature on Earth. Of course I read C.S. Lewis’ fantasy series, the Chronicles of Narnia, after which I wandered into Lewis’s little-known Christian space novel, Out of the Silent Planet. In a brilliant formal move, Lewis sidelines his scientists to secondary characters, an excuse to skip the trivia of how lightspeed engines operate. It is an awestruck Christian philologist—as in, he is literally stunned and kidnapped—who walks the alien planet with the wonder of an innocent in Eden.

“We dug our forks into a braised short rib with peanut butter and shrimp paste, prepared with such ardor that it brought us, forcefully, to our mouths and hands at the table.”

Perhaps this smacks of sacrilege, but just as I saw little distinction between the emotions at the core of religion and science fiction, so I failed to see the boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, literary realism, magical realism and pulp. Say a child steps through a wardrobe to find a vast, snowy forest; say a band of outcasts wanders for 40 years in the desert before discovering their land of milk and honey; say a teenager traces the orbit of two moons in an alien sky; say a refugee from Oklahoma beholds the fertile swells of California: each is the story of the ordinary world as an aperture to wonder.

***

A decade later, I was stopped by this sentence in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

I was 20 years old by the time I read these words. I lived in the heart of a gray city: Cambridge, England, where I studied at the famous university and dreamed of being a writer. Because my admission into this rarefied space had involved an aesthetic as well as intellectual education, I did not mention the other books that Waugh reminded me of; they were not serious literature. Certain texts were “guilty pleasures.” Certain consumptions were not spoken of.

***

Another decade passed. It was 2020. Under the gray skies of Washington state, I lived in isolation during a pandemic that seemed to close off every possibility of wonder. In the face of national and global crises—protests, elections, the fate of family and friends—I became impatient with my body. It was an annoyance, if not an outright embarrassment. Every so often it would clamor for a lavish meal, or a drink with a friend, or a trip. I cut these desires out when they surfaced, reminding myself that I had my health and a roof over my head. I pared my life down to survival.

“There is nothing small about the story of one woman rediscovering the wellspring of her own pleasure. I have come to believe that there is nothing more universal.”

I was also trying to survive the publication of my first novel. I had not prepared for the vast sense of loss that swept in when writing, once my private refuge, became public. The vulnerability of this event is usually balanced by the consolation of community, but in the isolation of 2020, I had no chance to meet readers face to face, or share rooms with booksellers and writers. I never saw my book in the physical world. I had only my loss. Writing seemed void of its original meaning. And then, in the spring of 2021, I ate a meal, and I wrote a book.

***

My second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, concerns a chef who faces, in the starkest way, the quandary of seeking pleasure in a dying world. The novel asks, where do you go when what you love loses meaning? How do you contend with the immensity of that grief? Is it possible to find a source of meaning again, deep within yourself?

To answer these questions, I had to write into the body.

My own body came alive again in 2021, on the evening of my first meal out with a friend. We gathered in the courtyard of a Filipino restaurant in Seattle. Stiff after long isolation, we moved through the necessaries: health, work, hardship, loss. And then the food arrived. A pause; the air shifted. We dug our forks into a braised short rib with peanut butter and shrimp paste, prepared with such ardor that it brought us, forcefully, to our mouths and hands at the table. For a few moments, there was nothing else to think about. No way to be but human.

My first novel ended with a girl, denied and sacrificed, who finally dares to ask what she wants. Land of Milk and Honey begins with this question, which I reencountered at that restaurant in Seattle. To eat that night was to look beyond survival, to believe that the world was capable of offering more. What I had dismissed as shameful and selfish in myself changed form at that shared table.

***

I am increasingly interested in the body as an instrument of meaning. My love for church resided in the physical thrill of liturgy: the transcendence of a single body expanding to join a shared search for meaning. I now seek that connection in literature, in art, in music—and yes, in food.

One project of this novel was to depict how the urges of an individual body may be no different than the feeling in a church pew. It took rigor and deliberation to render pleasure seriously, especially a woman’s pleasure. Too often female pleasure is dismissed as frivolous, selfish, small. As spectacle, or as a base instinct to master. But as Paul D says to Sethe at the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “You your best thing.” This novel is a love letter to food and pleasure as sacred, instrumental arts that our bodies are born capable of making.

This art can be found anywhere, in any form. If my novel is realism, then it is realism in the vein of Brideshead Revisited or the strange stories of Nicole Krauss, works alert to the epiphany in the daily. If my novel is speculative or science fiction, then it is the kind that blurs the spaces between the equal miracles of science, religion and magic. I am tired of constructing false boundaries: between my desires and my needs, between genres, between the high and the low. The chef in my novel grew up placing French-inflected Western fine dining on an altar. She learns to consider the other forms in which glory may also appear: in street food, in a meal of frozen peas cooked by an overtaxed parent, in a bag of Doritos.

There is nothing small about the story of one woman rediscovering the wellspring of her own pleasure. I have come to believe that there is nothing more universal. Consider the first fig I ate in the spring of 2021 in which I came back to life. My favorite fruit seller cut the fruit on his bare palm and offered me a taste. I was masked and wary, leaving the house only for what we called essentials; to accept the fig was to acknowledge a deeper form of nourishment. We spoke of the sweetness of figs, and asparagus, and the artichokes that would arrive next week, and the cherries promised next season, and all the seasons and meals and years ahead. Like many in the market, we peered through the narrow aperture of that year and chose to look toward abundance.

Read our starred review of Land of Milk and Honey.

Author photo by Clayton Cubitt.

C Pam Zhang’s debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, came out in the spring of 2020—a tremendously difficult time to be a first-time novelist. Yet her astounding voice and originality completely redefined the Western genre. Her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, is a true work of art, rooted deeply in pleasure, wonder and food.
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U.S. Army veteran Zac Topping’s debut novel, Wake of War, is a fast-paced military thriller set in the year 2037, a time when the United States is collapsing under decades of public unrest due to partisan divisions and a malfunctioning economy.

A new rebel faction is gaining traction in Salt Lake City under the leadership of the charismatic Joseph Graham. A ragtag team of men and women, the Revolutionist Front has proven to be a haven for all those who are hellbent on justice and revenge. This includes Sam Cross, who at 14 saw government soldiers gun down her family as she ran for her life. Now 19, she’s become a deadly sniper.

Fighting for the other side is James Trent, who joined the U.S. Army not out of moral conviction but rather to earn a military scholarship for college. During his three years in the service, he has managed to be placed in noncombat administrative missions, but now an involuntary reassignment sends him to the bloodiest and most dangerous rebel territory in Salt Lake City, dropping him and his platoon directly in the line of fire from Sam and the Revolutionist Front.

Most stories of war have a clear indication of the good side and the bad, but Topping has other intentions, as the conflict unfolds in chapters that alternate between Sam’s and James’ perspectives. Through their stories, Topping grapples with the wonder and worry that many of us feel regarding the current state of our nation. 

Topping, who has served two tours in Iraq, does a phenomenal job of using dialogue and scene details to impart the raw and dangerous wartime conditions that surround his characters. He focuses on the impact that unrelenting pain and helplessness have on the human soul—and how the thirst for power can corrupt the best of intentions. Wake of War will resonate with all readers who enjoy thrillers that reflect real-world crises.

In his fast-paced debut novel, Zac Topping, who has served two tours in Iraq, focuses on the impact that unrelenting pain and helplessness have on the human soul—and how the thirst for power can corrupt the best of intentions.
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Albert Einstein is frequently—falsely—attributed with having said, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” It’s quite the line, but it does beg the question: How do you tell how smart a fish is? 

That’s the problem facing animal cognition scientist Karin Resaint in Venomous Lumpsucker, the fifth novel from award-winning British novelist Ned Beauman. In the novel’s dystopian near-future, Earth’s climate is in free fall, and species are disappearing faster than beers at a frat party. When Chiu Chiu, the final giant panda, chomps on his last tiny bamboo shoot, the outrage is so great that 197 nations, “acting basically at economic gunpoint, [sign] up to the newly formed World Commission on Species Extinction.”

“The giant panda will be the last species ever driven to extinction by human activity,” proclaims a Chinese official at the WCSE’s founding. Of course, that’s not what happens; instead comes the extinction industry.

Everybody in the free market world knows that if you want to make an economic omelet, you’ll have to break a few environmental eggs. In this future culture, extinct animals’ DNA is digitally stored in biobanks, and the disappearance of a species is treated like carbon emissions, with taxes offsetting the habitat destruction that goes hand-in-wallet with surging profits. 

As in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, though, some animals are more equal than others. It costs a lot more under this scheme to snuff out a sentient species, so Karin has been charged with evaluating the intelligence of the venomous lumpsucker, and she’s feeling pressure from Brahmasamudram Mining, who’s funding the analysis. When a mid-level executive shows up aboard Karin’s research vessel with a special plea, the stakes suddenly leapfrog into the stratosphere and set the two on a frantic hunt for the last living lumpsucker. 

If all this sounds heavy for a summer read, not to worry. Beauman’s acerbic outlook breezes through what could otherwise be a portentous plot; think Smilla’s Sense of Snow as percolated through an Andy Borowitz filter, a mid-apocalyptic comic thriller ideally suited for a post-pandemic audience.

The fifth novel from award-winning British novelist Ned Beauman is a mid-apocalyptic comic thriller ideally suited for a post-pandemic audience.
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At its heart, Vauhini Vara’s twisty, thoughtful debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, is a fascinating alternate history and eerily plausible imagined future of the internet—and the tech corporations that have shaped it. With a sureness to her prose and a sharp eye for the tiny details that shape human lives, Vara, who has worked as a Wall Street Journal technology reporter and as a business editor for The New Yorker, combines three distinct storylines into a genre-bending, kaleidoscopic spiral of a tale.

Though the entire novel is narrated by Athena, the 17-year-old daughter of the most successful tech genius the world has ever seen, it shifts among three timelines. In a small village in 1950s India, King Rao, who will eventually become the most powerful man in the world, longs for a sense of belonging while growing up on his Dalit family’s sprawling coconut plantation. In 1970s Seattle, newly arrived in the U.S. for graduate school, King invents the device that will change the world forever: the Coconut computer. And in some unspecified near-future, a single corporation holds sway over the world’s citizens, who are referred to as Shareholders, and an all-powerful Board of Directors has expanded to replace all world governments. Within this imagined future, Athena recounts the events that led to her being imprisoned for her father’s murder.

This future is effortlessly believable, with irreversible global warming known as “Hothouse Earth,” capitalism running rampant, an unstoppable megacorp similar to an Apple-Google hybrid, and a mysterious computer algorithm controlling all aspects of public and private life. Yet for all its brilliant scope, The Immortal King Rao is also an intimate character study, offering an unflinching, close-up look at the complicated bonds of families.

There are no simple relationships in this book, and few moral absolutes. King is a ruthless, larger-than-life genius, but he’s also a scared, confused kid, a doting father and a lonely 20-something adrift in an unfamiliar world. As Athena pores over her memories of King—and parses through his memoirs, gifted directly to her brain through his final invention—she begins to understand all of these interlocking and sometimes contradictory pieces of him. What emerges is a remarkably tender and continually unpredictable story about familial and romantic love, ambition and greed, alienation and revolution, and one man’s unquenchable desire to leave a lasting mark on the world.

Satirical and heartbreaking, packed with historical detail and flawless dystopian world building, The Immortal King Rao is a striking multigenerational epic that tackles—and offers a surprising answer to—that age-old question: What are we here for?

In her striking multigenerational epic, Vauhini Vara combines three distinct stories into a genre-bending, kaleidoscopic spiral of a tale.
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There is no shortage of parenting books about how to be a good mother. Jessamine Chan’s first novel, The School for Good Mothers, will make you want to throw them all out the window.

Chan’s protagonist, 39-year-old Frida Liu, is kind, smart, hardworking and beautiful. She is also divorced from a cheating husband and the mother of 1-year-old Harriet, who is her world. Overworked, overwhelmed and unsupported, Frida has a very bad day that changes the course of her entire life.

This single moment of poor parenting lands Frida in a type of detention center, housed on a former university campus. Imagine The Breakfast Club, only it’s 365 days long, cut off from the rest of the world and filled with mothers who have been penalized by the government for making questionable choices. Right away, we wonder if the punishment fits the crime.

The plot thickens when the reform school starts seeming more and more like a prison. The guards, the uniforms, the rigorous daily classes on mothering, the therapy sessions, the robots (yes, robots)—it all seems so preposterous, so over-the-top. Maybe even humorous. That is, until you realize that it’s all grounded in our culture’s absurd expectations that mothers should be superheroes.

Throughout Frida’s story, Chan intertwines supporting characters who are just as interesting, thrilling and desperate as she is. You will catch yourself laughing one minute and shaking your fist the next, demanding that we change the narrative of contemporary motherhood.

If good writing, gripping plot and provocative questions about the world we live in are your priorities, then The School for Good Mothers needs to be on your reading list, whether or not you are a parent, or someday want to be.

There is no shortage of parenting books on how to be a good mother. Jessamine Chan’s first novel will make you want to throw them all out the window.
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Natashia Deón’s The Perishing is a dark, gritty and slow-burning mystery involving an immortal protagonist.

In Depression-era Los Angeles, a Black girl wakes up naked and alone in a downtown alleyway. She doesn’t know who she is, not even her name. Her body and mind are bruised but not broken, her origins a mystery. She’s placed with a Black foster family, and her foster mother suggests the name Louise, which gets shortened to Lou.

Lou may not remember her previous life, but her intelligence and talent are evident. She goes to high school and becomes a trailblazing journalist at the Los Angeles Times. But her feelings are divided; she vaguely thinks there might be a birth family out there for her, and a face continually haunts her, showing up in her sketches and dreams.

This is just one part of a story that hops between various time periods, including the future. As an immortal being, the woman known as Lou has lived many lives and has seen many things. Her storytelling is peppered with social observations and grim philosophical pronouncements about gender, race and the inhumanity of humankind. “We fight among ourselves in this village of earth,” she says, “wars to maintain elitism and its bounty, wars we should have never been fighting, where both winners and losers are traumatized and not just in war. But in love.”

The 1930s mystery of Lou’s family is a throughline in each era, as are recurrent themes of death and despair. As a new reporter, Lou’s beat is to report on the “tragic deaths of colored people,” and death touches her on a more personal level as well. In 2102, now named Sarah Shipley, the protagonist finds herself on trial. Acting as her own attorney, she pleads not guilty. “He got what he deserved,” she says. “I can defend all my lives. . . . And anyway, no woman kills unless in self-defense. If not in defense of a current wrong, for all the wrongs that came before without justice.”

Deón’s writing is beautiful, with a rat-a-tat quality, like brutal poetry mixed with fierce prose. The noirish plot is sometimes hard to penetrate, but fans of challenging and ambitious speculative fiction should be pleased.

Natashia Deón’s The Perishing is a dark, gritty and slow-burning mystery involving time travel and multiple lives.
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In the circumscribed dystopia of Laura Maylene Walter’s debut novel, Body of Stars, markings on girls’ bodies tell their futures, but one young woman learns to navigate in a new way—by using herself as constellation.

Celeste’s society operates under the rubric of a book titled Mapping the Future: An Interpretive Guide to Women and Girls, and the novel unfolds between excerpts and illustrations from this official guide. Hiding the markings is against the rules, even though the “changeling” markings on adolescents, before they finalize into adult markings, render the girls vulnerable to abduction. Girls are drugged and raped, and images of their markings are sold on black markets. Afterward, the girls are shunned.

The marks on teenager Celeste’s skin indicate that she will work with her brother, Miles, who has spent his whole life learning to read markings, a career forbidden to him because he’s a man. At first, Celeste is, like most girls, careful to fall in line with the plan laid out for her on her skin. But as she grows up, she questions the guide’s wisdom and wants to keep her markings private. By the time she is a changeling, Celeste commits to addressing the dangerous and too-common threat of abduction. When she receives her adult markings, she learns that her fate aligns with Miles’ in tragedy and hope.

The book’s fantastical premise is just distanced enough from reality to make Celeste’s story a tantalizing escape, and yet close enough that its implications are convincing. The characters are down-to-earth, average people, and both men and women face real gender challenges and work together to overcome them. The book’s palpable anger at injustice is met with love—a fierce, familial and able challenger. This is an exciting debut that fans of Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks will want to check out.

In the circumscribed dystopia of Laura Maylene Walter’s debut novel, Body of Stars, markings on girls’ bodies tell their futures, but one young woman learns to navigate in a new way—by using herself as constellation.

One must wonder while reading Fiona King Foster’s first novel, who is truly the captive? Is it fugitive Stephen Cawley, who spends the majority of the novel bound with rope and twist-ties, or is it protagonist Brooke Holland, who seems trapped by her past misdeeds? There is no easy answer, which makes the novel so beguiling.

The Captive is part adventure novel and part crime novel, set in a dystopian landscape where cellphones, the internet and vehicles are available to only certain people, particularly those in Federal-run cities. We slowly learn that Brooke is hiding a dark past from even her husband, Milo, and daughters, Holly and Sal. When she gets word that Stephen and his gang may be in the area, she immediately goes on high alert, certain that he has tracked her down and come to exact his revenge on her.

Brooke gets the drop on Stephen when he shows up at her rural cranberry farm, quickly overpowering him. Afraid the rest of his clan might not be far behind, she mobilizes her family, and together they set out on a punishing hike over rugged terrain, traversing more than a hundred miles to the nearest town, where she can turn Stephen over to the sheriff’s office and collect the reward.

Foster keeps the tension high as Brooke refuses to reveal why Stephen is so dangerous and why she is so hellbent on bringing him to justice. You have to admire Brooke’s determination and sense of concern for her family, but also Milo’s ability to keep it together as he tries to support Brooke and quell the kids’ simmering rebellion over her lack of answers. This initial stonewalling is, admittedly, a bit frustrating for readers as well, but as a credit to Foster’s writing, she effectively keeps readers in suspense all the way through.

One must wonder while reading Fiona King Foster’s first novel, who is truly the captive? Is it fugitive Stephen Cawley, who spends the majority of the novel bound with rope and twist-ties, or is it protagonist Brooke Holland, who seems trapped by her past misdeeds? There is no easy answer, which makes the novel so beguiling.

This ain’t no Louis L’Amour tale of the Wild West. Outlawed, the third novel by Anna North, is a gender-bending, genre-hopping yarn that’s part frontier novel, part Handmaid’s Tale and all ripsnorting fun.

North’s tale is set in a world in which women are expected to procreate and are persecuted if they don’t. Furthermore, a devastating flu-like illness has killed nine out of every 10 people. The women who survive and remain fruitful, it’s said, will be spared further sickness. Unfortunately, 18-year-old Ada, who assists her mother as a midwife, fails to bear a child for her husband after a year of marriage. Accused of witchcraft, she flees to a convent to atone for her “sin” but then learns of a place that may be more fitting, known as the Hole in the Wall.

It turns out to be less of a place and more of a cultlike gang of fellow outcast women. The leader of the group, who is regarded as “Not he, not she,” but simply the Kid, promises to build a nation of the “dispossessed, where we would not be barren women, but kings.” At first Ada is received with suspicion and skepticism, but when the Kid needs a doctor, her skills as a midwife and familiarity with medicines make her a useful addition to their clique. Before long, the Kid becomes a mentor figure to Ada, teaching her to ride, shoot and fight, while preaching the gospel of Christianity.

The novel takes its time in establishing the world and its characters, in particular Ada’s place in her new nonbinary world. But once the setup is complete, North picks up the pace with the Kid’s plan to rob a bank and, in doing so, take over an entire town. Ada becomes the tiebreaking vote among the gang in favor of the Kid’s plans, giving way to more customary Western shootout action against the sheriff who has been pursuing Ada from the start.

North, a renowned journalist who won a 2016 Lambda Literary Award for her novel The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, easily subverts expectations as her characters struggle to find their identites in a patriarchal world.

This ain’t no Louis L’Amour tale of the Wild West. Outlawed, the third novel by Anna North, is a gender-bending, genre-hopping yarn that’s part frontier novel, part Handmaid’s Tale and all ripsnorting fun.

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Catherine Hernandez’s sharp-eyed, queer dystopian fantasy is no gentle wake-up call. It is a blaring fire alarm and a call to arms against authoritarianism, white supremacy and transphobia. This surreal political nightmare unfolds in a near future in which an environmental disaster has ravaged the economy and amplified social tensions, clearing the way for a revanchist government to restore old-fashioned white patriarchal rule. It’s also the story of burgeoning awareness, resistance and uprising.

When Crosshairs begins, fascism is in full bloom in Toronto. With the police and military working arm in arm, the Others—people who are brown, Black, disabled or queer—are being rounded up and their property confiscated. Some are killed. The rest are forced into workhouses at gunpoint. The shift from subtle discrimination to outright oppression is swift, leaving many bewildered, as they can’t quite grasp what’s happening in their ostensibly liberal parliamentary democracy.

Readers experience the story primarily through Kay’s perspective. Kay stands smack-dab at the intersection of most of the identities targeted by this regime, and his initial objectives are simply, understandably, to stay alive and reunite with the love of his life, Evan. When the violence strikes too close to home, Kay and Evan temporarily separate so that Evan can secure his mother, with plans to meet in a safe place. As he waits in worry, Kay tells much of the story to his beloved in a “whisper letter,” writing, “My bed consists of two layers of cardboard boxes cut to fit in the corner of space behind the furnace, and a pile of Liv’s old winter coats, which I use as blankets and a pillow. The idea is, if I need to leave again and in a hurry, what remains behind won’t resemble a hideout for me: a Queer Femme Jamaican Filipino man. Anne Frank, minus the diary.”

As Kay indicates, the offenses carried about by the government have both literary and historical precedent. The events in Crosshairs feature both clear references and subtler parallels to the Holocaust. There are also echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Hernandez’s fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood. As in that feminist dystopian narrative, one of the first actions taken by the government against the Others is to restrict their finances without warning. The brutal shift to authoritarian rule is also blamed on terrorist action, just as in the earlier book.

At times, Hernandez’s prose style is gorgeously poetic. At other points, as when critiquing the authoritarian regime or the privilege of allies, the writing is openly didactic toward secondary characters who are little more than symbols and vehicles for argument. In these scenes, dialogue unfurls like political discourse rather than as urgent conversation about events happening around them. The subject absolutely merits impassioned appeal, but this aspect of the execution undermines its aim somewhat. Rhetorical appeals in fiction rely on two key things for effect: the reader’s absorption into the narrative and their identification with the protagonist. These phenomena encourage readers to let go of their defenses, effectively shutting down counterarguments, even when the story’s message conflicts with the reader’s prior beliefs. Kay is a brilliantly nuanced, fully formed character, both tender and brave, so identifying with him is easy. Where Crosshairs sometimes falls short, however, is in letting the reader fully engage and feel absorbed into the story. It’s hard not to see the forceful political appeal at work.

Catherine Hernandez’s sharp-eyed, queer dystopian fantasy is no gentle wake-up call. It is a blaring fire alarm and a call to arms against authoritarianism, white supremacy and transphobia.

Bea hunches over the earth, burying her stillborn daughter. She’s broken with grief, even for this child she did not want, whom she couldn’t envision bringing into such a hopeless world. But there’s no time to linger, as Bea lives in the wilderness. Animals are circling, hoping to find food for their own young, and Bea’s community is about to move on. She must redirect her attention to her living daughter, 8-year-old Agnes.

“They had seen a lot of death. They had become hardened to it. Not just the community members who had perished in grisly or mundane ways. But around them everything died openly. Dying was as common as living.”

In The New Wilderness, Diane Cook deepens her study of the relationship between humans and the earth, which she previously explored in the short story collection Man V. Nature. Bea and her husband, Glen, are part of a nomadic community in a wilderness state. Life in the City was untenable, especially after Agnes became so ill that Bea was prepared for her daughter’s death.

“The Community” starts out with 20 people, though its numbers fluctuate as members die and others procreate. There isn’t a lot of privacy—even young Agnes is aware of the adults’ copulation—and community members know they must stick together, even with those they dislike. Community members submit to being fingerprinted, having their cheeks swabbed and other tests. They’re being studied, but for what, they can’t say.

The wilderness feels dystopian to Bea, but it’s nearly all Agnes can recall. As they navigate a changing terrain and their own emotional landscapes, Cook incorporates the whole of human experience. The New Wilderness examines our relationships to place and to others as the Community considers its right to be on the land and whether others have any business sharing the space.

The New Wilderness examines our relationships to place and to others as the Community considers its right to be on the land and whether others have any business sharing the space.
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Is it possible to compose a satisfying sequel to a novel that’s become a modern classic? That’s a challenge in itself, but the difficulty goes up exponentially if said novel has also been turned into a blockbuster TV series. 

In her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which outlined a near future in which women’s freedom had been completely curtailed, celebrated Canadian writer Margaret Atwood leaps these hurdles with Olympian ease. The Testaments is a crowd-pleasing page turner. Atwood leans in to the attractions of both her original novel, with its Scheherazade-style narration, and the TV series, with its resistance-minded heroine. 

The Testaments is told in the first person by three narrators, allowing for a more panoramic view of Gilead than the cloistered Handmaid Offred could provide. The voice that flows with the most relish from Atwood’s pen, and that will be the most familiar to readers, is the Machiavellian Aunt Lydia. In Gilead’s patriarchal society, which categorizes women according to their function (Handmaids, for example, exist solely to bear children), Aunts are responsible for enforcing these roles. As a privileged member of an oppressed class, Aunt Lydia makes every decision with maintaining her status in mind. 

The other two narrators are young girls: one raised within Gilead’s walls by a powerful Commander and his wife, and the other raised in Canada as the child of Mayday resistance operatives. As their stories unfold, it becomes clear that the power to bring Gilead down may be in their hands. 

If a book must be groundbreaking to be a true classic, The Testaments can’t be ranked alongside its predecessor. Today, the divide between genre and literary fiction is more porous, and dystopian fiction is an established genre—in large part thanks to novels like The Handmaid’s Tale. But just as The Handmaid’s Tale was a response to the backlash against the women’s movements of the 1970s, The Testaments is equally of its time, drawing from contemporary politics in ways that resonate. Atwood remains a keen chronicler of power and the way status (or lack thereof) affects how it is leveraged, and seeing her explore that issue in Gilead once again is a pleasure.

Is it possible to compose a satisfying sequel to a novel that’s become a modern classic? That’s a challenge in itself, but the difficulty goes up exponentially if said novel has also been turned into a blockbuster TV series.  In her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which outlined a near future in which women’s […]
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After a sudden climate apocalypse, one of the only places left intact was Dinétah, a former Navajo reservation that has become a land where gods and supernatural heroes walk among humans. Preternaturally deadly monster hunter Maggie Hoskie is one of the byproducts of the supernatural rebirth of Dinétah. When her search for a missing girl and her monstrous captor goes south, Maggie is left with questions. Who created the monster that abducted the girl, and why? Maggie’s investigation leads her to reluctantly team up with Kai Arviso, an overly charismatic young medicine man with powers of his own. The further they dig to find the truth behind the monster, the more Maggie is forced to recognize that confronting her past may be the key to solving the mystery.

Trail of Lightning, the first in the Sixth World series by debut novelist Rebecca Roanhorse, is one of those books that grabs you by the hand and makes you listen. What separates it from other monster hunter books isn’t its plot. The basic plot arc could belong to almost any book within the genre. Its characters are typical of the monster hunter genre too: not always likeable, but always loveable. Its setting is remarkable, wonderful and strange, but so too are those of many other books. What then, is it that makes Trail of Lightning an unforgettable read? Even as some of the novel follows predictable patterns, so much of it is unexpected, turning what could be a straightforward plot into something both entertaining and thoughtful.

The best example of Roanhorse’s ability to take the standard and make it unexpected is in how she sets up conflict, particularly psychological conflict. Yes, Trail of Lightning is about a monster hunt. And yes, the fight scenes will make you hold your breath and sit on the edge of your chair. What sets the conflict apart, however, is how Roanhorse takes an action-heavy premise and makes it character-driven. On the surface, Maggie is exactly what we would expect from a monster hunter: dry, trigger happy and no-nonsense. But beneath that facade is a lot of trauma. Maggie has been taught by her former mentor to be ashamed and afraid of her gift, that it somehow makes her evil. She’s constantly questioning whether her power is turning her into the very kind of monster she’s been trained to hunt. This question dogs her at every movement, threatening to swallow her whole. In some books, this sort of constant introspection can be grating or even boring, usually because the angst it brings does nothing for the plot or characters. In Trail of Lightning, it’s what drives the plot, and it’s what makes its main character achingly human, a necessary feature for a book where the monstrous bleeds into the mundane.

Trail of Lightning has set a new standard for speculative fiction. Roanhorse has dazzled with this first installment into the Sixth World series, introducing readers to a world that will leave them eager to learn what else lies within the walls of Dinétah—and outside of them. The only downside is that we have to wait to learn what happens next.

After a sudden climate apocalypse, one of the only places left intact was Dinétah, a former Navajo reservation that has become a land where gods and supernatural heroes walk among humans. Preternaturally deadly monster hunter Maggie Hoskie is one of the byproducts of the supernatural rebirth of Dinétah. When her search for a missing girl and her monstrous captor goes south, Maggie is left with questions. Who created the monster that abducted the girl, and why? Maggie’s investigation leads her to reluctantly team up with Kai Arviso, an overly charismatic young medicine man with powers of his own. The further they dig to find the truth behind the monster, the more Maggie is forced to recognize that confronting her past may be the key to solving the mystery.

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