Wow. If you're looking for a powerful graphic novel to read, this is the one.
The 2017 fires in Northern California were absolutely devastating. I liveWow. If you're looking for a powerful graphic novel to read, this is the one.
The 2017 fires in Northern California were absolutely devastating. I live in San Francisco, and while the fires themselves never came close to our city, the air was full of smoke for weeks -- schools ending up closing, people were warned to stay inside and to wear masks while outside, and everyone had headaches and coughs from the lousy air quality. But of course, this is nothing compared to the suffering of those who perished as well as the thousands of people who lost their homes.
Author Brian Fies lived through it. A Fire Story is his memoir of the fire, starting with him and his wife waking up to red skies and the smell of smoke, grabbing a few items on their way out the door, and evacuating along with all of their neighbors -- then returning the next morning to find that the entire neighborhood was just gone.
The author initially drew/wrote some of these pages in the moment, using sharpies and a pad of paper, to capture and process the experience as it unfolded. From the book's notes, I understand that these images were initially shared online and went viral. He's now expanded from the initial drawings to convey a more encompassing picture of what he and others went through. Sprinkled throughout are the "fire stories" of others who lost their homes, how they dealt with their losses, and how they're still dealing with rebuilding and recovering. This is incredible stuff, truly.
Brian Fies shares his own experiences with candor and grace, and even some humor, as well as conveying the bigger picture of the reasons for the calamity and the scope of the loss -- and manages to keep a focus on the human impact that can be lost when dealing with a disaster of this magnitude. We may hear about thousands of people losing their homes, but as the author points out in this excellent book, each of those thousands has a unique, individual story to tell....more
Golden State is a weird mind-f*ck of a novel, and that's what makes it so wonderful. In a society where adherence to the Objectively So is the primaryGolden State is a weird mind-f*ck of a novel, and that's what makes it so wonderful. In a society where adherence to the Objectively So is the primary goal, the crime of telling a lie can lead to lengthy imprisonment or even exile, a fate assumed to be equivalent to death. Law enforcement agents like Lazlo can feel when a lie has been told, and their ability to sense anomalies leads them in pursuit of those who attempt to subvert the State with their untruths. People greet each other on the street by stating absolute facts ("A cow has four stomachs." "A person has one."), and the ringing of clock bells leads to streams of statements about the time, hour after hour after hour.
With a noir vibe that freely mixes in the sensibilities of Fahrenheit 451 and Blade Runner, Golden State is a treat to read. I wanted to stop to highlight passages practically everywhere -- there's so much clever wordplay and inversion of our understanding of what things mean. It's a great read, highly recommended. Now I need to get back to the other books on my shelves by this author, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to love them.
The Wild Dead is a sequel to last year's Bannerless, which I loved. (Check out my review of Bannerless, here.) In Bannerless, author Carrie Vaughn doeThe Wild Dead is a sequel to last year's Bannerless, which I loved. (Check out my review of Bannerless, here.) In Bannerless, author Carrie Vaughn does an amazing job of creating a post-apocalyptic world in which the focus is not on the disaster itself (known here as the Fall), but on life 100 years later. Humanity has survived, and in the Coast Road community (California), life revolves around households -- groups of adults who build a home together, a communal dwelling where all are invested in the success of the whole. Communities are groups of households with a central committee and a commitment to the greater good. It's a mostly agrarian society, where everyone contributes according to their abilities, and all are provided for... provided, that is, that some basic rules are followed.
The guiding principle in this world is producing enough, but not more. Quotas govern all farming, so that no one destroys the scarce natural resources by using up too much, too quickly. Households that demonstrate that they can support themselves may be granted banners, the most coveted reward of all. A Banner is a license to have a baby. A household may earn a banner through hard work and dedication -- but a household that tries to skirt the rules may be denied a banner forever.
Enid of Haven is an investigator -- the closest thing this society has to law enforcement. In this post-technology world, Enid can't rely on firearms or fingerprint dusting or forensic science; she has to use her brain and her people skills to ask questions, dig deep, and find the truth of a community's secrets. Enid is good at her job, but as The Wild Dead opens, she's mostly annoyed about being called away from her home in Haven to carry out a seemingly pointless investigation right as her household is expecting its first baby.
The investigation is set in the community of Estuary, a marshy, unpleasant location where the people live in uneasy proximity to one another. There's no true closeness or cooperation in Estuary -- the people seem argumentative and suspicious. And while Enid's case is simply about determining whether an old house should be preserved, the situation becomes complicated by the discovery of a body belonging to an outsider. As the investigation shifts from mediation to a murder case, Enig and her partner Teeg try to find a way to get the people of Estuary to share their secrets.
The Bannerless world is opened up further in this second book in the series. In the first book, the author did an amazing feat of world-building, showing us the Coast Road society, the nature of this post-tech world and how the people live. At the same time, she gives us a glimpse into the history of the Fall and how civilization re-formed in the century since then. In The Wild Dead, we explore further, and learn for the first time about the people who live outside the society of the Coast Road, choosing to live wild and with fewer resources rather than be restricted by the rules that dictate so many basic elements of life, including child-bearing.
The puzzle of the dead body is intriguing, and I enjoyed seeing Enid use her wits and intuition to read the situation in Estuary and finally arrive at the truth. The mystery aspects of the story are quite good, and held my attention from beginning to end. But truly, what I really love about these books is the detailed description of this unique world and how it works, and getting to understand the psychology of a society which has survived what could have been the end and has created a new version of the future.
(In some ways, I'm reminded of The Walking Dead -- minus the zombies, of course -- particularly the newest season, when the communities have rediscovered non-industrial era technology such as plows and windmills as a way of surviving and building after a disaster. But I digress...)
Enid is a terrific main character -- smart, strong, fair, and devoted to her people and to doing what's right. She's not perfect, and she struggles with herself quite a bit, but in the end, she's committed to the essence of being an investigator: helping others, and being kind.
I highly recommend both Bannerless and The Wild Dead. I'm really hoping this will be an ongoing series. I can't see myself ever getting tired of Enid or her world....more
This father/son-written novel starts at a point not so foreign to our world today -- a drought in California that's gone from bad to worse. Water restThis father/son-written novel starts at a point not so foreign to our world today -- a drought in California that's gone from bad to worse. Water restrictions have been in place for a while. Lawns are brown, swimming pools are empty, and the Central Valley, California's agricultural hub, has become a new Dust Bowl.
As the story opens in a Southern California suburb, Alyssa's mother turns on the kitchen faucet, and nothing comes out. Is this the result of yet another plumbing mishap on the part of Alyssa's father? When the family turns on the news, they discover it's the Tap-Out -- there is no more water. Outside of California, the situation is slow to draw attention, as there's a major hurricane wreaking havoc on the East Coast. It doesn't seem so dire at first. Surely, the water will be back soon.
A visit to stock up at Costco that afternoon reveals the panic already setting in. The bottled water shelves are already empty. So are the shelves of Gatorade, juices, and anything else to drink. People are intense and possessive, in competition for the remaining liquids. Alyssa and her brother fill a cart with bagged ice, which they then need to fiercely protect from predatory adults. It's only been a few hours, and already kindness is evaporating along with the water supply.
Alyssa's next door neighbor Kelton and his family are "preppers" -- survivalists in suburbia, with a well-stocked safe room, an armory, and all sorts of defensive perimeter booby traps, as well as a bug-out location in the mountains. But as the neighborhood becomes more and more tense, even this well-guarded and provisioned home won't remain safe for long.
As is typical for a YA adventure/survival tale, we eventually end up with the teens cut off from their parents and forced to make life-or-death decisions if they're to have any chance of survival. Things get violent and scary very quickly. Panic leads to riots and death. Martial law is declared and people are herded into evacuation camps -- but even there, there's only enough water for about a tenth of the people cramming into the centers. As people get more and more desperate, safety becomes even more elusive. Finally, Alyssa and Kelton, joined by two other teens, are on the run with Alyssa's younger brother, seeking hydration and safety from the masses, just looking for a place to hole up and wait out the Tap-Out. It can't last forever... can it?
Of course, the danger isn't only from desperate mob violence and panic. Dehydration sets in quickly. People find all sorts of inventive ways to find sips of water, just trying to stay alive -- but reading about the early and then more advanced stages of dehydration is plenty horrifying.
Dry takes place over little more than a week, and it's fascinating to see how quickly society disintegrates in the face of such a catastrophe. Alyssa's brother Garrett refers to the people so desperate for water that they'll do anything as "water-zombies" -- and it's no surprise that some scenes reminded me of The Walking Dead, as normal life and the moral standards of civilization break down in the face of a very basic threat to survival. I was also reminded in many ways of Mike Mullin's Ashfall series, in which a natural disaster of catastrophic proportions leads to this same type of societal collapse.
Dry is a quick, pulse-pounding read -- I finished it over a day and a half of intense reading. I was drawn to this book because I'd just read Scythe and Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman over the summer, and found those books deep and thought-provoking (as well as being outstanding adventures). Dry doesn't provoke the same sort of queries about life and purpose as those books, and it lacks the character development I found so engaging in Scythe. I was absolutely caught up in the story of Dry, but didn't find myself caring deeply about any of the specific characters, who all sort of blended together as the POV shifted from chapter to chapter.
An additional minor quibble is that reasons and consequences are glossed over for the sake of moving the action forward. I would have liked to learn more about the events that led to the Tap-Out, and how the water was able to be restored finally. Reading Dry, we just have to accept these developments as fact, but more detail would have helped make it all seem more real.
(view spoiler)[A final complaint, and it's spoilery: I found it incredibly frustrating that not once, but two separate times, a perfectly good supply of water was ruined. I particularly hated the scene when Alyssa's brother Garrett accidentally dumped Comet into the family's tub of drinking water. Yeah, they needed to be forced into a more desperate situation, but this was just so dumb! If the water was so irreplaceable and necessary for survival, better precautions should have been taken. Later on, there's a cooler full of bottled water that also gets destroyed -- and it just wasn't necessary to the plot or to convey the dire straits of the characters. (hide spoiler)]
I do recommend Dry. It's a scary, intense adventure, as well as a cautionary tale about climate change and the need to pay attention, NOW, before things get so much worse....more
I really have no idea what to say about this odd book, other than it's weird, quirky, and surprisingly touching, and filled with the amazing writing tI really have no idea what to say about this odd book, other than it's weird, quirky, and surprisingly touching, and filled with the amazing writing that I love in all of Andrew Smith's books....more
Interesting premise, but I felt this book fell flat in execution. Plus, an ending that's not really an ending -- is there a sequel planned? Otherwise,Interesting premise, but I felt this book fell flat in execution. Plus, an ending that's not really an ending -- is there a sequel planned? Otherwise, the ending may have been intended to be open and ominous, but just felt unfinished to me....more
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