This is a book of inter-related short stories about environmental activism. I really liked the thoughtful tone of each story and the interesting characters.
The book begins with Eleanor and her two adult children, Ava and Ed. Eleanor has dedicated her life to environmental reforms, as she tries to get companies see that helping the environment can also help their bottom lines. Until recently she believed that approaching problems calmly and rationally was the best way to make progress. Only now she sees many of the biggest gains in her career, like reducing deforestation of the Amazon, unraveling. She’s just won a major environmental award and has to make a big speech, while feeling she hasn’t accomplished anything much at all.
In a nutshell, this book is about the despair many of us are feeling about the environment. Even though we’ve known about the climate perils that face us, we’ve become almost numb to the horror stories. It’s not even an issue anymore of whether you believe in climate change – the evidence is all around us but it feels much too late to do anything.
But there’s hope as well. Hope in scientific advances, in activism, and in the energy and idealism of youth. Schuyler shows us in these stories how the love of an animal or a happy childhood memory might lead us to think more about the earth than ourselves.
I found the characters in these stories very interesting, even though we don’t get to spend much time with them. One of my favorite stories was about Lucinda, a woman who volunteers in an animal shelter following a personal crisis, and has developed a strong bond with one of the dogs. I also liked the story about the hacker who finds himself unexpectedly having a life-altering conversation with a woman whose car he’s just hacked.
At first I found myself looking for recurring characters across these stories, but there aren’t many of those. Instead, the author ties these stories and characters together in a way I wasn’t expecting.
A unique thing about this book is the away the author personifies nature. The author notes in her acknowledgements that she wanted readers to think of nature as an entity with thoughts and feelings, rather than just seeing it as something that serves us.
Night and I, we are the oldest of friends, all the way back to the beginning. It moves up from the ground, fusing trees, bushes, and bodies. As it inks the sky, night reveals a great truth. Edges, boundaries, separation, they exist, but the fragmentation is contained in something bigger and that is wholeness.
While it’s an unusual perspective and Schuyler’s writing is often beautiful, it also felt like a distraction at times, taking away from the other characters. I think it could have been used more sparingly to the same effect.
This book would be a great accompaniment to climate-related nonfiction like Hope Jahren’s The Story of More, or Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, or Jane Goodall’s The Book of Hope. It’s a perfect example of how fiction can help us see important issues in a different way.
Note: I received an Advanced Review Copy of this book from publicist Sparkpoint Studio and NetGalley. It published July 2, 2024 and has won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature.