Articles by: Mary Woodbury

Face, Jaspreet Singh

In his playful yet deeply serious third novel Jaspreet Singh links a fossil fraud in India, an ice core archive in Canada, and a climate change laboratory in Germany.

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Thrust, Lydia Yuknavitch

As rising waters–and an encroaching police state–endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a carrier travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history

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Weird Fishes, Rae Mariz

When Ceph, a squid-like scientist, discovers proof of the ocean’s slowing currents, she makes the dangerous ascent from her deep-sea civilization to the uncharted surface above. Out of her depths and helpless in her symbiotic mech suit, Ceph relies on Iliokai, a seal-folk storyteller, who sings the state of the […]

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Backyard Wildlife – The View

Back to Series Overlooking our rose gardens, spruce trees, and then meadow beyond is an old balcony that has seen better days. We finally replaced some of its rotting wood this year but noticed that the railing needs work as well. It’s also slowly rotting, and the compost forming therein […]

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Spotlight – Jewell Parker Rhodes

Click here to return to the series About the Book This month we travel to California, a beautiful state to which many dreamers have traveled. It’s also an area where wildfires have increased each year. According to NASA: Eight of the state’s ten largest fires on record—and twelve of the […]

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Indie Corner – Aleksandar Nedeljkovic

Back to the Indie Corner series I’m happy to reboot our Indie Corner this month with a spotlight on Aleksandar Nedeljkovic and his novel ALT (Atmosphere Press, 2022). ALT offers a glimpse into a perilous near-future version of our world—one we feared would come for us but desperately tried to […]

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Backyard Wildlife – Smelling like Dirt

Back to Series “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” ― Margaret Atwood I’ve begun my most recent newsletters with a quote. This one by Margaret Atwood is so true. It’s not just dirt we smell like at the end of the day. […]

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The Devil’s Dictionary, Steven Kotler

Click here to return to the series About the Book I’m always excited to talk with authors living in and writing about different places around the world. Steven Kotler’s newest novel, The Devil’s Dictionary (St. Martin’s Press, November; hardcover in April), takes place in an abundance of locales, including London, […]

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Wind, Ellen Dee Davidson

Wind Book Review Reviewed by Mary Woodbury Book information Author: Ellen Dee Davidson Publication date: February 1, 2022 Wind, by Ellen Dee Davidson, is a wonderful novel for children and adults alike. Starting with an adventurous and colorful book cover and getting right into the main character Katie’s whimsical daydreaming […]

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The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, Octavia Cade

A chilling novella about extinction, grief, and what we hold onto when the world falls apart. With the collapse of ecosystems and the extinction of species comes the Grief: an unstoppable melancholia that ends in suicide. When Ruby’s friend, mourning the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, succumbs to the […]

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Mad Honey, Katie Welch

Katie Welch reminds us that we are a very small part of a massive and complex non-human world and that, where we heed the lessons of non-centrality, we can also truly love. Mad Honey is a beautiful novel. –Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Perfecting and All the Broken Things When Beck Wise vanished, his […]

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The House of Drought, Dennis Mombauer

I’m eagerly awaiting The House of Drought, which comes this summer of 2022 from one of my favorite publishing houses, Stelliform Press: The House of Drought is a weird horror novella which Mombauer pitched during December 2020’s #PitMad Twitter pitch contest. The story delves deep into the destabilizations of climate […]

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A House Between Earth and the Moon, Rebecca Scherm

A novel born out of speculation about climate change, this tale has the richest billionaire’s going to live on the moon while the rest suffer on an ecologically burnt Earth. Prescient and insightful, A House Between Earth and the Moon is at once a captivating epic about the machinations of big […]

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Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to […]

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Hovering, Rhett Davis

The Guardian calls Hovering a climate-collapse novel. A spectacular debut novel from one of Australia’s most exciting new writers. Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award, Hovering crosses genres, literary styles and conventions to create a powerful and kaleidoscopic story about three people struggling to find connection in a chaotic and […]

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