Imagines a future not purely dystopian, not centered so much on elaborate world-building as on how human beings adapt, survive, and continue to seek beauty, solace and communion in the face of the relentless challenges of an increasingly inhospitable environment ... McConaghy keeps the novel moving at a blustery pace, thanks to her deft plotting and shared point of view ... Exceptionally imagined, thoroughly humane.
It’s a rare novel that has so many simultaneous sources of trouble, and it’s to McConaghy’s credit that her plot’s many interlocking escalations only rarely seem forced. But even when the action veers toward the melodramatic, it feels fitting enough ... The novel also offers its injured characters a path back to connection and community, a risk McConaghy argues must be worth taking, no matter how fraught the future, no matter how temporary the family.
McConaghy weaves her questions into a story filled with intensely real-feeling characters and their strong emotions ... An exceptional book that hands readers a bittersweet helping of sorrow and joy, sounding a clarifying call towards a symbiotic survival that prioritizes our need to do more than simply subsist: to put trust in each other and in the nature that surrounds us.
McConaghy’s descriptions of nature’s glory and terror are galvanic, the psychological struggles wrenching, the suspenseful action spectacularly choreographed. McConaghy has attained new heights of intensity and lacerating ecological conviction in this complexly plotted, tragic, and all-consuming tale of the battle to survive in a catastrophically changing world.
McConaghy’s thought-provoking and passionately told novel is about family and trust, but it is also about climate change and the effect of severe weather on our environment and on our lives.
