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
Though uneven, this is still a pleasurable, comforting read.
Infertility, family secrets, and alpacas all figure in Quindlen’s latest meditation on mothering and domesticity.
Polly’s life looks enviable. Happily married to the adoring Mark—a vet at the Bronx Zoo—she teaches English at a private Manhattan girls’ school and loves her work. She has a protective older brother and close girlfriends, who’ve formed a book club where no one is expected to read the book. But Polly desperately wants a child and, at 42, knows time is running out. She and Mark have gone through endless fertility treatments, to no avail. Meantime, Polly’s friends have given her a DNA kit as a jokey birthday gift, and something mysterious shows up in the test results. Then, out of nowhere, a young woman contacts her, suggesting they may be related. That’s not all: Polly feels estranged from her mother, a revered judge who’s insufficiently maternal in her daughter’s view. Her father has always cherished her, but he’s in a nursing home now with a rapidly failing mind. And something is amiss with her best pal, Sarah. Quindlen’s trademark empathy is evident throughout, and her wry humor leavens some of the serious goings-on. Early on, Mark and Polly visit a fertility clinic with photos of babies in the waiting room; for Polly, “it felt…like a Weight Watchers facility with hot fudge sundae pictures on the wall.” Then we meet these charming alpacas, humming and pronking, on a farm run by an earth mother, whose wisdom will help Polly get on with her life. The plot swerves around a bit, there may be one surplus narrative thread (e.g., Polly’s star student Josephine running aground after graduation), and at the end, the author ties things up too neatly, pushing the “circle of life” theme too hard.
Though uneven, this is still a pleasurable, comforting read.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593734605
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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