Yellow Pine’s a contested space: the phrase describes both a poorly-conceived green energy project and the protest camp that pops up to counter its existence. The conflict between the two looms over a couple gripped in midlife crisis in this smart, spiky novel ... Watkins deploys incredible grace and rich humor as she populates this stark landscape with eccentric characters struggling with recovery, a society out of step with humanity, environmental doom, and the boom and bust of tourism ventures ... You may not want to join their daily struggle, but you appreciate it — and deeply enjoy their company ... Watkins skillfully chronicles a world of chosen families and iconoclast women who can’t deny their sentimental hearts.
A smart, sexy, surprisingly hopeful novel about the world going to hell ... Watkins has never written more confidently or staked so much on her unmistakable voice, which winds through environmental catastrophe, goofy comedy, and sexual obsession ... Watkins knows this desert well. It isn’t merely the setting of Yellow Pine — it’s the very model for its plot. Change is hard to spot here. This isn’t a T.C. Boyle climate novel; movement is rare and constrained in these pages, which have the metabolism of a kangaroo rat — a compliment, I promise. Almost everything interesting happens underground.
Less emotionally raw than Watkins’s previous book ... I will admit that I loved this novel most when Watkins set aside her exhausting, if justified, litanies long enough to show her characters at their most vulnerable.
The book is less of a novel than a novel-length riff, but what it lacks in the way of narrative arc it amply provides in passages of gobsmacking beauty juxtaposed with gobsmacking destruction, in bizarro humor, desert-dry wit and a blistering, more-is-more style of lefty critique ... Four books into her oeuvre, one gets the sense that what keeps pulling Watkins back like a doomed tortoise to this place where the air feels like 'the hot breath of hell' is more than just her biography. In the Mojave’s very precarity, she shows, lies not just its majesty, but its power to endure.
Has notable strengths ... However, the plot meanders and has odd discrepancies ... It also becomes maddeningly unclear how Watkins wants us to view her characters ... It’s also a problem that there are so many scenes where the characters lecture each other ... She should have been the ideal person to write a sympathetic novel about this world. But in Yellow Pine, what could have been an important addition to the genre of climate fiction is instead an often likable but ultimately confusing mess.
Churning with Rose’s ethical, profane, furious, funny, and cosmic reflections and forays into desert geology, ancient goddess cultures, and numerous books, Watkins’ keen and righteous novel wrestles with myriad paradoxes, spirituality, and how ecocide does 'deep, grievous injury to the collective soul.'
