MANDALAY HAWK'S DILEMMA

Young teens face climate change head-on in Aronson’s middle-grade novel.

In 2030, when a Category 4 hurricane hits Maine, 13-year-old Mandalay Hawk is home alone; her father, Tom, is away, and the roads are closed. Water and wind batter the house, and Mandalay barely survives a roof collapse. Afterward, she’s fed up with adult complacency about extreme weather; to grab attention, she breaks into her high school, Nagatoon Regional, and steals 50 electronic “dweebs”—tabletlike devices donated by energy company Star Power—and sets them on fire in the parking lot. In lipstick, she writes on a chalkboard, “If we don’t stop global warming now, it will be too late. It will make the pandemic of 2020 look like a picnic in the park!!!” The action gets Mandalay expelled and placed in front of Judge Mary Baxter, who fines her $50,000 and sentences her to a year’s probation. She and Tom move to Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, where she befriends classmates Jazmin and Gute, the latter a dedicated reader who shuns personal electronic devices. As the trio grows closer, Mandalay reveals her past, and the teens start missing school to tour the city, which, in this era, is ravaged by floods. When their history teacher, Mr. Harkness, learns that the students are researching climate change and the United States’ past response to crises during their outings, he allows them to continue their jaunts. Eventually, Mandalay decides to hold an event at City Hall, and with her friends’ help, she starts KRAAP (Kids Revolt Against Adult Power) but remains unsure about the future.

Aronson’s impassioned novel could serve as a primer for a generation that sees climate change’s effects up-close in the coming years. The world he envisions is surreal, frightening, and, unfortunately, visible on our horizon today. His Manhattan, for example, is so hot that it can support palm trees, and it has canals to divert the rising Atlantic Ocean; fire has claimed the animals of the Bronx Zoo, and lower Broadway has “two feet of smelly, yucky, greenish water and no people.” Other problems include tent cities of climate refugees from uninhabitable states, such as Florida, and constantly hazy skies filled with wildfire toxins. People also carry “stink towels” because they never stop sweating. The book states its themes bluntly, as when Jazmin says, “As a species, we’re pathetic....We just let this happen. To satisfy the materialism of our civilization, more and more fossil fuel is still being burned.” Still, Aronson tries to insert humor in scenes involving the twin principals, Homer and Hubert Bushwick, who try to rein in Mandalay’s behavior. The narrative’s final third introduces some far-fetched elements involving U.S. President William “Bucky” Billingham, but they’re less important than the informative exposition for young readers: “Anthropocene is a term used to describe the current scientific—or geological—period in time...in which humans have impacted earth and climate in a negative way.” The finale is pure wish fulfillment, but anything less would be criminal.

A scathing work and an essential blueprint for youth battling climate change.