Beatrice works at Twin Bridge, a chronically underfunded residential treatment center in near-future East Texas, teeming with enraged teenage girls on either too many or not enough drugs. On a normal day, it's difficult for Beatrice and the other staff - Arda, Carmen, and Linda - to keep their cool in dust-blown Askewn. But when a heat wave triggers a massive, sustained blackout, Beatrice and the other staff and residents must evacuate. Facing police brutality, sweltering heat, panicked evacuees, the girls' mounting withdrawal, and the consequences of her own lies, they search for a route out of the blackout zone.
Nolan’s novel is profoundly responsive to an emerging historical circumstance, joining the proliferating ranks of climate fiction like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower ... I find it remarkable how enjoyable this book is. … Some of this comes from the tight, well-paced plot, and some of it comes from careful wordsmithing ... I cannot recall the last work of climate fiction that made the crisis feel quite so imminent.
Nolan is a skillful satirist, and one whose aim is extensive, wickedly funny and true ... Despite finding a whole world of bad out there, Nolan leaves her readers, in the end, feeling maybe just a little bit happy.
There’s a lot going on in this impressive novel ... Nolan has an MFA from the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and it shows in the sheer (and largely realized!) ambition of this novel as well as in her lyrical writing. At first the style seems at odds with her narrator’s background—years of calamities and migration, with little time for reflection. But it also offers a sign of optimism that Beatrice’s flight will someday pause long enough to take a deep breath and tell her tale.
