Florida gets a much-needed reset via climate apocalypse in a bighearted instructional tale.
In Clark’s cautionary climate change tale, a Florida village leader in a deluged future recalls his boyhood in the 2020s.
Clark’s novel opens in the late 21st century. The “Captain,” a village elder living on Florida’s disappearing coastline, describes his youth in the catastrophic 2020s (“the Roaring Twenties”), when climate change led the seas to nearly swallow the Sunshine State. After his sailor father went AWOL from the Navy in a George W. Bush–style resource war, the juvenile hero finds a surrogate dad in the neighborhood eccentric, a hermit called Harrison, whose DIY compound is self-designed and landscaped to survive escalating storms and floods. Harrison’s mysterious partner is a striking, dark-skinned “Amazon Warrior Princess” called Calusa, an alleged remnant of lost tribes who thrived before White invasion. The boy introduces his skeptical mom to Harrison’s “Hermitage” and its peculiar ways. The little commune lacks building permits and maintains a welcoming attitude to the area’s Haitian minority, aggravating the vile, racist bureaucracy in the local housing association. But Harrison is vindicated when only his structure withstands a killer storm (“the Big One”) that drowns much of the state. A remote federal government cannot bring relief to the general populace. Only Harrison’s minicolony shows a sustainable future using tidal irrigation, shell middens, and off-the-grid technology, like solar power. The tone here is agreeably all ages, and while many “cli-fi” novels (including YA ones) maintain a dreary pessimism, Clark’s invokes the utopian rather than dystopian. Harrison, with wry pop-culture references, outlines Western civilization’s sins (like the Industrial Revolution). With the Captain by his side as an apprentice, Harrison turns disaster into positive change via small-is-beautiful philosophies, revivals of a barter economy, and conducting maritime trading among the fresh island chains wrought from post-flood Florida. Literary allusions include The Swiss Family Robinson, though readers may remember another Harrison-like visionary/survivalist protagonist in Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast (1981). That guy ended a doomed madman; in comparison, this serves a more upbeat, if still bittersweet, forecast of rough weather ahead.
Florida gets a much-needed reset via climate apocalypse in a bighearted instructional tale.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73430-830-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: First Run Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Let’s hope for more from the next book set in this world.
Sasha Cadell has survived against all odds, holding onto her loved ones and strangers as they take their last breaths—and that’s why she’s known as Death’s Angel.
For six years Sasha has lived in Haven, the underground society built to withstand nuclear war. Since the war, since her family’s deaths, since discovering she doesn’t get sick like everyone else does, Sasha’s life has been full of death and overfull with grief. While working in the Ward, Haven’s limited hospital, she stays with patients as they die. When Tristian Hayes, a unit commander of the Force, ends up as her patient, hanging on for his life, she pleads for him to stay alive. He does—upending her bleak ritual as Death’s Angel. Hoping to forget everything she’s seen and to numb the pain, Sasha leaves the Ward in favor of a role with a pickax, expanding Haven’s tunnels. Tristian, fiercely determined and stunningly stubborn, recruits Sasha to the Force for a vital mission aboveground. The story picks up steam with Sasha’s intense training to become the medic for Tristian’s tightknit unit. Together, they bear the weight of their unit’s survival and all that’s left of humankind. While in training, Sasha struggles to discern friends and enemies, but nothing is as challenging as facing her own demons. In this prequel to her debut novel, Conform (2025), Sullivan tries to accomplish a lot with both the worldbuilding and plot machinations, resulting in a convoluted story and flattened characters. The plot doesn’t have a satisfying payoff, but the romantic tension between Sasha and Tristian will keep readers engaged.
Let’s hope for more from the next book set in this world.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9798217091027
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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