Articles by Mary Woodbury

When Immortals Reign

Author: © J. Zornado Series: 2050: A Future History, Volume III Publisher: Merry Blacksmith Press Publication Date: June 15, 2015 Ordering: See publisher above or Amazon Social Media: J. Zornado The Keys to the Kingdom Simon upon damnable Simon! How tiresome it is to hear how he is worshipped! I […]

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Porter’s Collected Works (Limberlost), Gene Stratton

Gene Stratton-Porter was an American author, amateur naturalist, wildlife photographer, and one of the earliest women to form a movie studio and production company. She wrote some best-selling novels and well-received columns in national magazines, such as McCalls. Her works were translated into several languages, including Braille, and Stratton-Porter was […]

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Barkskins, Annie Proulx

From Annie Proulx—the Pulitzer Prize-­ and National Book Award-­winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain,” comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world’s forests. Also see an interview in The New Yorker. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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Satin Island, Tom McCarthy

In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures–as only he can–the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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Leaphorn & Chee Series, Anne Hillerman & Tony Hillerman

Leaphorn & Chee is a series started by Tony Hillerman. When he died, his daughter, author Anne Hillerman, took over the series. A moderator at our Google newsgroup, Charlene D’Avanzo, calls this an environmental mystery series. According to Charlene: I call them environmental mysteries – novels in which the natural […]

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2050: A Future History – Series, J. Zornado

Thanks to author J. Zornado, professor of English at Rhode Island College, for news of his trilogy 2050: A Future History. He writes: The overarching narrative is a meditation on knowing.  It is also a projection about where things are headed from here, given our obsessions with AI, cloning, and […]

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Through the Eyes of a Stranger, Will Bonsall

A picture of a sustainable future realm contrasted with one much like our own. Wonderful heartwarming plot, eye-opening setting, and timeless topics. This book might well suit readers from 10 years old on. It’s a tale of escape from a distopic empire to a wondrous contrasting country, both set half […]

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Climate Change Novels Set in British Columbia

I have blogged before about Clara Hume’s book Back to the Garden, which Moon Willow Press published in late 2013. Clara Hume, an author local to British Columbia, begins the novel in the Selkirk Mountains of northern Idaho, just over the border from the Thompson-Okanagen-Similkameen-Kootenay regions of BC. In Back to […]

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Octavia’s Brood, Walidah Imarisha

Conventional exclamatory phrases don’t come close to capturing the essence of what we have here in Octavia’s Brood. One part sacred text, one part social movement manual, one part diary of our future selves telling us, ‘It’s going to be okay, keep working, keep loving.’ Our radical imaginations are under […]

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Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, Gerry Canavan, Kim Stanley Robinson

Contemporary visions of the future have been shaped by hopes and fears about the effects of human technology and global capitalism on the natural world. In an era of climate change, mass extinction, and oil shortage, such visions have become increasingly catastrophic, even apocalyptic. Exploring the close relationship between science […]

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Kaboom!, Brian Adams

We are pleased to showcase Brian Adams’ newest book KABOOM!, a YA eco-novel. We interviewed Brian after the publication of his recent novel Love in the Time of Climate Change, which won the Forward Review IndieFab 2014 gold medal in the humor category. Congrats to Brian on his newest endeavor. […]

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A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson

This beautiful book of children’s poetry, another I found at the bookstore in Port Moody, was originally published in 1885 and “reflects a Scottish poet’s vision of the Victorian world.” Illustrated by Joanna Isles (from a 1994 reprint), A Child’s Garden of Verses, with dozens of poems, is exploding with old-time […]

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Kissing Frogs, Alisha Sevigny

Popular party girl and high school senior Jessica Scott has a secret: she used to be a nerd — a big one — a goody two-shoes, grade-skipping, all-state spelling bee champ. But she lost the braces, put on some contacts, and applied all her academic genius to studying and imitating […]

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Listen, Francesca Varela

In Listen Francesca tells us the story of May. May is a piano-genius college freshman who dreams of becoming a brilliant composer. In her school’s practice rooms she meets Conner, an undeniably unattractive junior, and she is immediately captivated by his raw musicality on the piano. As May tries to […]

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