We Are Strong, But We Are Fragile

by Bob Mustin

2090 A.D. — The America nation has collapsed, and its remnants have been at war for a half-century.

Samuel II, mayor of Citadel, a Blue Ridge Mountain enclave, is determined to end the city’s wars with a devolved tribal society called Freedomland. He sends troubled but insightful city archivist Jakob History to a bartering meet-up, hoping an interview with tribal leader Abraham Trapper might help further peaceful relations. Instead, the encounter leads Jakob to reexamine America’s past. Soon, Jonathan, Jakob's mentor, exposes the archivist to a surprising link with Abraham, which seems to set Jakob at odds with Citadel. But when Samuel leads Jakob to a danger-filled glimpse of Abraham’s tribal life, the archivist’s preconceptions of both cultures comes crashing down. Finally, a last, fateful encounter between Jakob and Abraham lays bare human strengths and weaknesses that are at the basis of civilization itself.

143 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 15, 2014

About the author

I've had a brief naval career and a longer one as a civil engineer in Georgia. During the early '90s, I was the editor of a small literary journal, The Rural Sophisticate, based in Georgia. In 2003, I was a North Carolina Writers Network writer-in-residence at Peace College under the late Doris Betts' guiding hand. My work has appeared in The Rockhurst Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Cooweescoowee, Under The Sun, Gihon River Review, Reflections Literary Journal, and at thesquaretable.com, raving dove, Sport Literate, The Externalist, Language and Culture, and R.KV.R.Y in electronic form. I also have two novels and one novella to my credit. A collection of connected short stories will be published late in 2012 or early 2013.

Reviews

[Amy Butcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel was a great find, as it has excellent writing with fully fleshed out characters. The author has taken great care to make a speculative world that is very believable while making a statement about the nature of and tension between community interdependence and individual freedom.

My favourite part of this book was the prose, sentences like "Frigid air coursed over me like a pent-up river, the hardened flecks of snow like so many grains of wind-enraged sand" really set the tone of the desolation of the world, the coldness and the hardness, and the anger that seems to seep through everyone and everything made hard through war, politics and simply survival.

I would have liked more descriptions of the setting; I felt like the environment could have been more of a character than it was. But this is a novel about "history," so perhaps it's understandable that the author spends more time unfolding the events of this world to the reader.

Readers of historical fiction and speculative should really enjoy this book!