Earnest economic expositions and detours on “the national quarrel” over leaving the EU, along with marriage’s financial disadvantages for women and the damage done to the Cornish landscape by climate change, sit side-by-side with what Hannah refers to self-consciously as “the murder plot”. –The Guardian Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads
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Climate change is both an external and internal phenomenon in Catherine Bush’s brilliant new novel, Blaze Island. Set on an island off the coast of Newfoundland, its cast of characters includes a renegade climate scientist and his young daughter Miranda. They are self-made castaways who can’t get far enough away […]
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Echoing Keats’s famous ode, the book is punctuated by placid country scenes of grain being harvested, birds flying south, days growing shorter and nights longer and colder. So familiar is this picture of autumnal transformation that readers are easily lulled into a false sense of comfort. But it slowly becomes […]
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Flora Smith, Jamaican scientist and head of tiny NGO Environment Now, dedicates her life to getting Jamaicans to care about the natural environment. At the opening of Limbo, Flora is confronted by the nagging reality of not having enough money to keep her organization afloat. When sand is stolen from […]
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When a tiger cub escapes from a nature reserve near Neel’s island village, the rangers and villagers hurry to find her before the cub’s anxious mother follows suit and endangers them all. Mr. Gupta, a rich newcomer to the island, is also searching—he wants to sell the cub’s body parts […]
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With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn’t yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing is […]
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In 1994 in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores is saved from drowning by a shiver of sharks. His family, struggling to make ends meet amidst the collapse of the sugar cane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favour from ancient Hawaiian gods. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
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Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to […]
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Despite its decade-long gestation, Watershed is both timely and urgent as it imagines a semi-dystopian future in Alberta brought on by climate change. In the year 2058, the glaciers have vanished and a catastrophic drought has plunged the prairies into despair. –Calgary Herald Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
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Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Middle grade fiction When Willa’s dad takes her on a whale-watching trip to see the migrating humpbacks, an unexpected thing happens: A whale talks to her. The whale, called Meg, seems as surprised as Willa that the two can understand each other, but they form a […]
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Funny, whimsical, philosophical, and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately asks: What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? Unferth comes at this question with striking ingenuity, razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare comic-political drama, a tour de force for our time. Goodreads Reviews […]
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Weaving together the lives of these characters, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
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Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Young Adult Fiction Content Warning: This book includes descriptions of death, depression, attempted suicide, animal poaching, animal cruelty, forced migration, human trafficking, war, genocide, child soldiers, and rape. Following the death of her boyfriend, high school senior Valentine falls into a severe depression and nearly overdoses […]
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Ever the aimless drifter, Harish finds the anchor his life needs in a chance encounter with members of the ancient and threatened – Jarawa community-the ‘original people’ of the Andaman Islands and its tropical rain forests. As he observes the slow but sure destruction of everything the Jarawa require for […]
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Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly Middle Grade Fiction Sometimes a book just stops you in your tracks and demands that you sit with it, pushing aside as many demands of “real life” as you can in order to lose yourself in the book’s world. […]
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