In this gripping sci-fi thriller, genetically altered teens fight for survival in a near-future society that is redefining what it means to be human. Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads [Coming May 2019] In the second installment of the Spliced series, sixteen-year-old Jimi Corcoran risks her life to clear a friend’s […]
Read MoreArticles by Mary Woodbury
The Wild Birds, Emily Strelow
Emily Strelow’s mesmerizing debut stitches together a sprawling saga of the feral Northwest across farmlands and deserts and generations: an American mosaic alive with birdsong and gunsmoke, held together by a silver box of eggshells—a long-ago gift from a mother to her daughter. Written with grace, grit, and an acute […]
Read MoreMother of Rain, Karen Spears Zacharias
Using the idiom of the time and place–a small, close-knit, East Tennessee community as the Depression yields to World War II–the story follows the struggles of Maizee Hurd as she suffers through a series of setbacks from childhood on: the gruesome early death of her mother; her father’s rejection; the […]
Read MoreJaws of Life, Laura Leigh Morris
In the hills of north central West Virginia, there lives a cast of characters who face all manner of problems. From the people who are incarcerated in West Virginia’s prisons, to a woman who is learning how to lose her sight with grace, to another who sorely regrets selling her […]
Read MoreWaste Tide, Chen Qiufan
Chen tells me he saw “a huge garbage field” in which migrant workers “are using their hands to break down the pieces of electronic devices, putting them on heat to melt the metals, or putting them in acid pools to dissemble the elements.” It is, he says, an environment of […]
Read MoreRemembrance of Earth’s Past Series, Liu Cixin
Chinese sci-fi has become a global phenomenon thanks to a trilogy by Liu Cixin, a former software engineer from Yangquan. The first novel, The Three-Body Problem, was published in China in 2008 and in English in 2014…In [the novel], the existential threat to humanity is something that will be visited upon […]
Read MoreThe City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders
Anders, former editor of io9 and Hugo and Nebula Award-winner for 2017, writes a story of a divided future world in stasis. January is a colonized planet split into two halves, one always bright-hot and one always freezing dark. The two habitable human cities straddle the small zone of dusk […]
Read MoreShrinking Sinking Land, Kell Cowley
One week before the Global Mandatory Hibernation and Flea Wheeler will do anything to avoid a long winter underground. A claustrophobic climate refugee who has been living rough on the flooded streets of Manchester, Flea dreads the day she’ll be forced into shelter so a geoengineering experiment can attempt to […]
Read MoreTreed
Author: © Virginia Arthur Publication Date: September 20, 2018 Ordering: Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Amazon Social Media: Author’s website, Goodreads Back to the Dragonfly Library Excerpts Wiping tears off her face, she returned to the hotel where an envelope from Millicent was waiting for her. Once in her room, she […]
Read MoreClimate Change Author Spotlight – Ned Tillman
Back to the series I continue my spotlight focus on authors whose novels are aimed toward a young adult and/or teen audience. These books might be interesting to teachers looking for titles that their students can read and discuss together; the storytelling about climate change is not entirely new but […]
Read MoreCave Walker, Donelle Dreese
My hope is that Cave Walker fits into contemporary eco-fiction in the sense that nature occupies a central space in the novel almost at all times. The Maine woods through which Gillian hikes to reach the holy cave is a character. Each cave is a distinct character. Even when Gillian […]
Read MoreWhere the Forest Meets the Stars, Glendy Vanderah
After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary […]
Read MoreGreat American Desert: Stories, Terese Svoboda
Preorder at The Ohio State University Press Svoboda (Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, 2016, etc.) returns to her art’s quintessential landscape to relate the overlapping epochs of the great American desert…A challenging author’s take on the most challenging of subjects—the survival of our species […]
Read MoreTentacle, Rita Indiana
Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (originally published in Spanish as La mucama de Omicunlé) is a speculative text that has as much to say about the future as it does about the present. While the novel is set in the Dominican Republic in the year 2037, it is as much a commentary on the […]
Read MoreCompass Rose, Anna Burke
Click here to return to the series This month I spotlight Anna Burke and her novel Compass Rose (Bywater Books, 2018), a dystopian high-seas adventure that examines climate refugees, hanging ocean ecosystems, and ways humanity might adapt to rising, warmer oceans while also following the protagonist as she comes of […]
Read More