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Sinking Islands
Sinking Islands continues the story of Bronwyn Artair, a scientist who possesses the power to influence the natural forces of the Earth. After several successful interventions, including one in Siberia, she has gone into hiding, worried about unintended consequences of her actions, as well as about the ethics of operating solo. But circumstances call her to action again, and an idea takes shape: What if she could impart her skill to other people? Gathering a few kindred souls from climate-troubled places around the world--Felipe from São Paulo, where drought conditions are creating strains on day-to-day life; Analu and his daughter Penina from a sinking island in the South Pacific; and Patty from the tornado-ridden plains of Kansas--she takes them to the wilds of Northern New Hampshire where she tries to teach them her skill. The novel, realistic but for the single fantastical element, explores how we might become more attuned to the Earth and act more collaboratively to solve the enormity of our climate problem.
- GenresMagical Realism
304 pages, Paperback
Published September 14, 2021
9 people are currently reading
118 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 28, 2021
In Cai Emmons' popular novel, WEATHER WOMAN, Bronwyn Artair drops out of her prestigious doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT to take a job as a television meteorologist in New Hampshire. It's there that she learns she has the power to control the weather.
Bronwyn's story continues in the recently published sequel, SINKING ISLANDS (RedHenPress). Bronwyn's notoriety has forced her into hiding with her boyfriend on a remote island off the coast of Seattle. It's a time for her to reflect on the results of her actions and the ethics of changing the world herself. Inspired by the chance that she may be able to teach others, she gathers a group of like-minded people at a camp in Northern New Hampshire. It's there that the group works to understand Bronwyn's connection to the natural earth and learn if they can activate their own powers.
Sinking Islands is an timely enjoyable read that focuses on our current concerns about climate change. Bronwyn is a smart, strong female protagonist, who readers will like and root for. She learns to wield her powers safely and bravely. Even the most reasonable person will find wonder and truth here.
SINKING ISLANDS stands alone. You don't have to read WEATHER WOMAN first, although you probably will want to because both books are so fabulous.
Bronwyn's story continues in the recently published sequel, SINKING ISLANDS (RedHenPress). Bronwyn's notoriety has forced her into hiding with her boyfriend on a remote island off the coast of Seattle. It's a time for her to reflect on the results of her actions and the ethics of changing the world herself. Inspired by the chance that she may be able to teach others, she gathers a group of like-minded people at a camp in Northern New Hampshire. It's there that the group works to understand Bronwyn's connection to the natural earth and learn if they can activate their own powers.
Sinking Islands is an timely enjoyable read that focuses on our current concerns about climate change. Bronwyn is a smart, strong female protagonist, who readers will like and root for. She learns to wield her powers safely and bravely. Even the most reasonable person will find wonder and truth here.
SINKING ISLANDS stands alone. You don't have to read WEATHER WOMAN first, although you probably will want to because both books are so fabulous.
October 20, 2021
Realistic and fantastical individual and ecological interconnectedness (New England, Midwest, Southern, and Western US, a South Pacific island, Australia, Brazil, and the Arctic; contemporary timeframe): Cai Emmons is an extraordinary wordsmith who’s created a two-book series on the magical powers of personal relationships and their interconnected relationships with Nature, and how individuals and groups have the power to change the trajectory of the climate change crisis. Each stands alone; together their strength is multiplied so this review encompasses both.
Weather Woman, the original novel, introduces some of the same well-drawn characters you’ll find in Sinking Islands. Its focus is primarily America; the sequel expands globally.
Book 1 sets forth the fantastical plot: that someone fascinated by weather and cloud formations since childhood is so acutely sensitive to atmospheric conditions they have a supernatural ability to alter the weather. Bronwyn Artair, thirty, getting her doctorate at MIT in atmospheric sciences, is that person. Unlike anyone you’ve known or heard of, her “long, wavy, dark-red hair” makes her physically stand out, but her superhuman power makes her unique.
Bronwyn’s rare gift takes the message of what each of us could do to make any difference in reducing global warming is far-fetched, extreme, but extreme eerie weather is what’s happening around the world. Scientists have told us time is running out; not everyone is listening or feels the urgency to act aggressively like Bronwyn intensely does. Everything about these novels is intense, including Emmons’ gifted prose.
Bronwyn “does not read people as she reads the earth.” She “burns hotter” with her “gutsy, mercurial nature.” Her mother died five years ago, leaving her awfully alone. Except when she’s in Nature, the “perfect solution for soothing a human being,” when she’s not “lost in a cyclone of loneliness.” The author’s literary, poetic prose is gorgeous: sometimes expressed meteorologically.
Emmons writes about the human condition of loneliness and how the devastation of climate change has caused profound loneliness. In Sinking Islands, we’re taken to more places around the globe where climate destruction has either transformed or threatens to erase their beauty. The mood in both novels isn’t just gloom and doom, though; it’s also wonderment and awe of Nature’s therapeutic powers and why we must find therapies to save and heal our aching planet.
If you think the premise is too wacky, too science-fiction-y, consider a proven scientific concept cited called the Butterfly Effect. The phenomenon captures Bronwyn’s moral dilemma when she finally accepts she can change weather (Book 1). The video below explains the theory as: “Small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case”:
https://youtu.be/r2zOZ2WW8HE
In both novels, but more seriously in Sinking Islands, Bronwyn thinks not only of the potential benefits of her power but of unintended, harmful consequences. Described as a “thinker,” we get to see how she thinks and how her thinking evolves starting with the first time she’s done something unbelievable with a storm atop Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, famous for its extreme weather.
Initially, she thinks whatever she’d done is an aberration; we think it’s a weird coincidence. When she influences weather again, she thinks something’s wrong in her brain. When it happens again, she’s tormented by thinking she’s “coming unhinged,” having a nervous breakdown, or experiencing early onset dementia. When a witness sees how she stopped rain at a wedding, it spreads virally. Add a couple more witnesses to other weather conditions and she’s disgusted that she’s lost her privacy. Until she starts wondering could she do it again? Then tests herself in Kansas and Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley, later California’s wildfire country. Weather Woman tracks her evolution.
Sinking Islands raises the stakes from what one individual can do to experimenting with teaching others since she alone cannot possibly change the weather around the world. In Book 1 she’s “in love with the world like never before”; in Book 2 she spreads that love to a select group ripe for her interventions as they’re from beautiful places that global warming has despoiled. Their coming together isn’t just a statement about making a difference ecologically, but how doing so affects our relationships and humanity.
Weather Woman opens with Bronwyn’s doctoral studies under the mentorship of Professor Diane Fenwick, whom she’s known since she was eighteen; Diane convinced her to pursue academic science. They became very close friends; Diane loves her like the daughter and child she never had. (Happily married to Joe, a novelist who spends time in their cozy cottage in Maine to write). Mentor and mentee have two different personalities: Diane, the “extrovert” confident and commanding; “painfully shy” Bronwyn unsure of herself.
Hard sciences at an elite institution is a tough place for a woman. Bronwyn is constantly mocked by male students to such a degree that she questions and then decides she’s not cut out for academia and leaves the program to Diane’s great dismay, which continues into the sequel. Moving to southern New Hampshire to work as a meteorologist on TV, Bronwyn rents a secluded cabin in the woods overlooking a peaceful river. One day a reporter from Florida, Matt, shows up at the station and is immediately attracted to her. Their story is intense. How could it not be given Bronwyn’s intensity? Unlike Diane, a doubter of anything unless backed up by scientific data, he’s heard about Bronwyn’s otherworldly power, doesn’t believe it either but willing to turn his life upside down to be with her. Joe, whose career relies on imagination, is open-minded too, along with a few other believers appearing in one or both novels.
It’s Diane’s belief in Bronwyn that matters most. But her reaction is that this isn’t “thinking outside the-box – this is thinking outside the range of known human capability.” The reader will see whether Diane comes around or not in Sinking Islands.
Emmons, who taught creative writing and screenwriting at the University of Oregon, describes herself as a “word-lover” and “people lover” – both on full display. Sinking Islands has an even more ambitious reach than Weather Woman, but both are remarkable and thought-provoking.
The sinking island earns the title of Book 2 because it’s more momentous than a “discrete thing” as “all oceans are connected.” Located in the South Pacific, it could be any of the “islands of plastic” in which “apocalyptic” floods have washed plastics onto the shore, overwhelming sewage systems spreading “industrial chemicals, and human waste, and algae bloom, and deadly bacteria.” Two characters stand out in the island storyline: eleven-year-old Penina who has “limitless energy” like Bronwyn, and her lonely father Analu. He and Nahani, his wife, have already grieved the loss of their other two children who drowned from the high waters, so they decided to leave the island despite a dying grandmother’s wish not to. For Analu, the island has become a “winking hologram of beauty and sadness.”
A different type of “water crisis” is happening in São Paulo, Brazil. Severe drought is “squeezing the verve from everyone.” Felipe, a dancer in the theatre with the body of “Adonis,” is the central character. At forty, he’s single as dance has been his life. “Hydric collapse” means audiences are so on the edge they’re not coming to performances. This once lively city is rioting over water, diseases are spreading from standing water collected in buckets, and reservoirs are alarmingly low for a city that once owned “twelve percent of the world’s fresh water.” “Where does the soul of a city reside?”
Emmons whisks us to the Arctic Circle to draw our attention to magnitudes: survival under the most extreme weather conditions in Greenland, where the melting glaciers remind us of the butterfly effect warming Earth, affecting all of us. Except these hardy, resourceful Greenlanders still feel the “delicious joy of being alive.” Why don’t we, given all we have, the novel asks.
Although these two novels can’t provide answers, the message is we can still do something, individually and as a group. We’ll never have Bronwyn’s mythical ability to “coral” enormous concentration to release enormous energy through the body into the atmosphere, but we can make an effort that can have ripple effects.
Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)
Weather Woman, the original novel, introduces some of the same well-drawn characters you’ll find in Sinking Islands. Its focus is primarily America; the sequel expands globally.
Book 1 sets forth the fantastical plot: that someone fascinated by weather and cloud formations since childhood is so acutely sensitive to atmospheric conditions they have a supernatural ability to alter the weather. Bronwyn Artair, thirty, getting her doctorate at MIT in atmospheric sciences, is that person. Unlike anyone you’ve known or heard of, her “long, wavy, dark-red hair” makes her physically stand out, but her superhuman power makes her unique.
Bronwyn’s rare gift takes the message of what each of us could do to make any difference in reducing global warming is far-fetched, extreme, but extreme eerie weather is what’s happening around the world. Scientists have told us time is running out; not everyone is listening or feels the urgency to act aggressively like Bronwyn intensely does. Everything about these novels is intense, including Emmons’ gifted prose.
Bronwyn “does not read people as she reads the earth.” She “burns hotter” with her “gutsy, mercurial nature.” Her mother died five years ago, leaving her awfully alone. Except when she’s in Nature, the “perfect solution for soothing a human being,” when she’s not “lost in a cyclone of loneliness.” The author’s literary, poetic prose is gorgeous: sometimes expressed meteorologically.
Emmons writes about the human condition of loneliness and how the devastation of climate change has caused profound loneliness. In Sinking Islands, we’re taken to more places around the globe where climate destruction has either transformed or threatens to erase their beauty. The mood in both novels isn’t just gloom and doom, though; it’s also wonderment and awe of Nature’s therapeutic powers and why we must find therapies to save and heal our aching planet.
If you think the premise is too wacky, too science-fiction-y, consider a proven scientific concept cited called the Butterfly Effect. The phenomenon captures Bronwyn’s moral dilemma when she finally accepts she can change weather (Book 1). The video below explains the theory as: “Small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case”:
https://youtu.be/r2zOZ2WW8HE
In both novels, but more seriously in Sinking Islands, Bronwyn thinks not only of the potential benefits of her power but of unintended, harmful consequences. Described as a “thinker,” we get to see how she thinks and how her thinking evolves starting with the first time she’s done something unbelievable with a storm atop Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, famous for its extreme weather.
Initially, she thinks whatever she’d done is an aberration; we think it’s a weird coincidence. When she influences weather again, she thinks something’s wrong in her brain. When it happens again, she’s tormented by thinking she’s “coming unhinged,” having a nervous breakdown, or experiencing early onset dementia. When a witness sees how she stopped rain at a wedding, it spreads virally. Add a couple more witnesses to other weather conditions and she’s disgusted that she’s lost her privacy. Until she starts wondering could she do it again? Then tests herself in Kansas and Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley, later California’s wildfire country. Weather Woman tracks her evolution.
Sinking Islands raises the stakes from what one individual can do to experimenting with teaching others since she alone cannot possibly change the weather around the world. In Book 1 she’s “in love with the world like never before”; in Book 2 she spreads that love to a select group ripe for her interventions as they’re from beautiful places that global warming has despoiled. Their coming together isn’t just a statement about making a difference ecologically, but how doing so affects our relationships and humanity.
Weather Woman opens with Bronwyn’s doctoral studies under the mentorship of Professor Diane Fenwick, whom she’s known since she was eighteen; Diane convinced her to pursue academic science. They became very close friends; Diane loves her like the daughter and child she never had. (Happily married to Joe, a novelist who spends time in their cozy cottage in Maine to write). Mentor and mentee have two different personalities: Diane, the “extrovert” confident and commanding; “painfully shy” Bronwyn unsure of herself.
Hard sciences at an elite institution is a tough place for a woman. Bronwyn is constantly mocked by male students to such a degree that she questions and then decides she’s not cut out for academia and leaves the program to Diane’s great dismay, which continues into the sequel. Moving to southern New Hampshire to work as a meteorologist on TV, Bronwyn rents a secluded cabin in the woods overlooking a peaceful river. One day a reporter from Florida, Matt, shows up at the station and is immediately attracted to her. Their story is intense. How could it not be given Bronwyn’s intensity? Unlike Diane, a doubter of anything unless backed up by scientific data, he’s heard about Bronwyn’s otherworldly power, doesn’t believe it either but willing to turn his life upside down to be with her. Joe, whose career relies on imagination, is open-minded too, along with a few other believers appearing in one or both novels.
It’s Diane’s belief in Bronwyn that matters most. But her reaction is that this isn’t “thinking outside the-box – this is thinking outside the range of known human capability.” The reader will see whether Diane comes around or not in Sinking Islands.
Emmons, who taught creative writing and screenwriting at the University of Oregon, describes herself as a “word-lover” and “people lover” – both on full display. Sinking Islands has an even more ambitious reach than Weather Woman, but both are remarkable and thought-provoking.
The sinking island earns the title of Book 2 because it’s more momentous than a “discrete thing” as “all oceans are connected.” Located in the South Pacific, it could be any of the “islands of plastic” in which “apocalyptic” floods have washed plastics onto the shore, overwhelming sewage systems spreading “industrial chemicals, and human waste, and algae bloom, and deadly bacteria.” Two characters stand out in the island storyline: eleven-year-old Penina who has “limitless energy” like Bronwyn, and her lonely father Analu. He and Nahani, his wife, have already grieved the loss of their other two children who drowned from the high waters, so they decided to leave the island despite a dying grandmother’s wish not to. For Analu, the island has become a “winking hologram of beauty and sadness.”
A different type of “water crisis” is happening in São Paulo, Brazil. Severe drought is “squeezing the verve from everyone.” Felipe, a dancer in the theatre with the body of “Adonis,” is the central character. At forty, he’s single as dance has been his life. “Hydric collapse” means audiences are so on the edge they’re not coming to performances. This once lively city is rioting over water, diseases are spreading from standing water collected in buckets, and reservoirs are alarmingly low for a city that once owned “twelve percent of the world’s fresh water.” “Where does the soul of a city reside?”
Emmons whisks us to the Arctic Circle to draw our attention to magnitudes: survival under the most extreme weather conditions in Greenland, where the melting glaciers remind us of the butterfly effect warming Earth, affecting all of us. Except these hardy, resourceful Greenlanders still feel the “delicious joy of being alive.” Why don’t we, given all we have, the novel asks.
Although these two novels can’t provide answers, the message is we can still do something, individually and as a group. We’ll never have Bronwyn’s mythical ability to “coral” enormous concentration to release enormous energy through the body into the atmosphere, but we can make an effort that can have ripple effects.
Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)
June 19, 2021
This book is simply stunning. One dazzling sentence after another captures the wonder of our natural world, even as the story makes it crucially clear that humankind is destroying that world. The time is past when we can save it, but we must join together to do all that we can. The urgency of the story and the structure that gradually gathers the cast of actors reminds me of The Overstory. Without tumbling into speculative fiction, these characters are superheroes with extraordinary powers. The message: we all have those powers.
I read an advance copy of this book, due out Sept. 2021.
I read an advance copy of this book, due out Sept. 2021.
October 26, 2025
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Sinking Islands continues the story of Bronwyn Artair, a scientist who possesses the power to influence the natural forces of the Earth. After several successful interventions, including one in Siberia, she has gone into hiding, worried about unintended consequences of her actions, as well as about the ethics of operating solo. But circumstances call her to action again, and an idea takes shape: What if she could impart her skill to other people?
Gathering a few kindred souls from climate-troubled places around the world—Felipe from São Paulo, where drought conditions are creating strains on day-to-day life; Analu and his daughter Penina from a sinking island in the South Pacific; and Patty from the tornado-ridden plains of Kansas—she takes them to the wilds of Northern New Hampshire where she tries to teach them her skill. The novel, realistic but for the single fantastical element, explores how we might become more attuned to the Earth and act more collaboratively to solve the enormity of our climate problem.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Now that Bronwyn's "out of the closet," so to speak, as someone with a unique and effective ability to change the world's weather as climate change bites us ever harder, she's got qualms.
The men who want to use her powers do not.Retreating from the pressures of the desperate world witb a scoobygroup of others she will teach how to use her newly discovered powers, Bronwyn learns, tests, grows.
Should she simply use her abilities to effect local changes without ever knowing in advance what the global consequences are? Should the same behavior, in other words, that was used to get us into this mess be used to try getting us out? Unlike lesser writers' heroes, Bronwyn considers this ethical and practical conundrum seriously. She does it collaboratively, not solipsistically. She does it with all due haste because the world is changing fast and the consequences are dire (I'd argue condign, as well, but I'm sorta Savonarola-y on the subject.) “Death turns everything inside out. After death, nothing’s the same, for the living or the dead.”
Then, when she's determined what the course of action should be based on all the evidence she can accumulate and all the counsel she can trust, the world feels her scoobygroup's efforts. As climate catastrophes mount, as Bronwyn and her support staff take more and more drastic action, things do change.
Change, then, is possible. Change is necessary. Change can...must...come from inside you as you effect it wherever you are, as you model its reality to anyone who looks or even watches you effect it, and those few who study your efforts to reproduce them for themselves.
This 2021 title deserves our attention, with its prequel for multiple reasons. One is the men and women who surround, support, and assist Bronwyn to bring her vision and her power to reality. Another is the sheer idiocy of male-dominated power structures in their dismissal or outright rejection of ideas from women. A further idea that needs wider currency is the need for women to simply up and do stuff because it all needs doing. Waiting for validation attention or perish forbid permission is no longer an option. The world is very badly in need of all hands running to the pumps to do their own best.
Author Emmons left Bronwyn and company here. I think that's a good thing. I felt the message was delivered, the ideas explored in the depth that informed and encouraged but stopped before overwhelm set in. The books are a good set, a good length of time with these admirable people, and that counts for a lot in a world with too much and not enough always tipping, tipping, tipping....
The Publisher Says: Sinking Islands continues the story of Bronwyn Artair, a scientist who possesses the power to influence the natural forces of the Earth. After several successful interventions, including one in Siberia, she has gone into hiding, worried about unintended consequences of her actions, as well as about the ethics of operating solo. But circumstances call her to action again, and an idea takes shape: What if she could impart her skill to other people?
Gathering a few kindred souls from climate-troubled places around the world—Felipe from São Paulo, where drought conditions are creating strains on day-to-day life; Analu and his daughter Penina from a sinking island in the South Pacific; and Patty from the tornado-ridden plains of Kansas—she takes them to the wilds of Northern New Hampshire where she tries to teach them her skill. The novel, realistic but for the single fantastical element, explores how we might become more attuned to the Earth and act more collaboratively to solve the enormity of our climate problem.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Now that Bronwyn's "out of the closet," so to speak, as someone with a unique and effective ability to change the world's weather as climate change bites us ever harder, she's got qualms.
The men who want to use her powers do not.Retreating from the pressures of the desperate world witb a scoobygroup of others she will teach how to use her newly discovered powers, Bronwyn learns, tests, grows.
Should she simply use her abilities to effect local changes without ever knowing in advance what the global consequences are? Should the same behavior, in other words, that was used to get us into this mess be used to try getting us out? Unlike lesser writers' heroes, Bronwyn considers this ethical and practical conundrum seriously. She does it collaboratively, not solipsistically. She does it with all due haste because the world is changing fast and the consequences are dire (I'd argue condign, as well, but I'm sorta Savonarola-y on the subject.) “Death turns everything inside out. After death, nothing’s the same, for the living or the dead.”
Then, when she's determined what the course of action should be based on all the evidence she can accumulate and all the counsel she can trust, the world feels her scoobygroup's efforts. As climate catastrophes mount, as Bronwyn and her support staff take more and more drastic action, things do change.
Change, then, is possible. Change is necessary. Change can...must...come from inside you as you effect it wherever you are, as you model its reality to anyone who looks or even watches you effect it, and those few who study your efforts to reproduce them for themselves.
This 2021 title deserves our attention, with its prequel for multiple reasons. One is the men and women who surround, support, and assist Bronwyn to bring her vision and her power to reality. Another is the sheer idiocy of male-dominated power structures in their dismissal or outright rejection of ideas from women. A further idea that needs wider currency is the need for women to simply up and do stuff because it all needs doing. Waiting for validation attention or perish forbid permission is no longer an option. The world is very badly in need of all hands running to the pumps to do their own best.
Author Emmons left Bronwyn and company here. I think that's a good thing. I felt the message was delivered, the ideas explored in the depth that informed and encouraged but stopped before overwhelm set in. The books are a good set, a good length of time with these admirable people, and that counts for a lot in a world with too much and not enough always tipping, tipping, tipping....
March 17, 2022
“Death turns everything inside out. After death, nothing’s the same, for the living or the dead.”
“You might have to lose something you like if you want to find something better.”
Sinking Islands is a book about strangers coming together all over the world to combat global warming. Bronwyn Artair can manipulate the weather, but she realizes she can’t save the world by herself. Her widespread notoriety has forced her into hiding, where she reflects on the unintended consequences of her actions, as well as the ethics of literally changing the world by herself. Hopeful that she might be able to teach her ability to others, she gathers a group of strangers– Felipe from Sao Paulo, where drought conditions are creating strains on day-to-day life; Analu and his daughter Penina from a sinking island in the South Pacific; and Patty from the tornado-ridden plains of Kansas. The disparate group works together to learn Bronwyn’s power so that they can activate their own and affect change in their respective countries.
This was not a quick read. The writing is beautiful and poetic and I believe this story is best read slowly. Sinking Islands is the sequel to Weather Woman, but it works perfectly fine as a stand alone.
I will reiterate from my prior post that the author is suffering from ALS in its (in my medical opinion) worst form. So please check her out. Show her some love and support! Read her beautiful words and immerse yourself in her stories while she still has the voice to tell them.
Thank you to @mbc_books, Cai Emmons, and Red Hen Press for this complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.
“You might have to lose something you like if you want to find something better.”
Sinking Islands is a book about strangers coming together all over the world to combat global warming. Bronwyn Artair can manipulate the weather, but she realizes she can’t save the world by herself. Her widespread notoriety has forced her into hiding, where she reflects on the unintended consequences of her actions, as well as the ethics of literally changing the world by herself. Hopeful that she might be able to teach her ability to others, she gathers a group of strangers– Felipe from Sao Paulo, where drought conditions are creating strains on day-to-day life; Analu and his daughter Penina from a sinking island in the South Pacific; and Patty from the tornado-ridden plains of Kansas. The disparate group works together to learn Bronwyn’s power so that they can activate their own and affect change in their respective countries.
This was not a quick read. The writing is beautiful and poetic and I believe this story is best read slowly. Sinking Islands is the sequel to Weather Woman, but it works perfectly fine as a stand alone.
I will reiterate from my prior post that the author is suffering from ALS in its (in my medical opinion) worst form. So please check her out. Show her some love and support! Read her beautiful words and immerse yourself in her stories while she still has the voice to tell them.
Thank you to @mbc_books, Cai Emmons, and Red Hen Press for this complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.
August 15, 2024
How even to describe this? A beautiful book about how people come together to solve their problems. But mostly how we connect as humans to those who are different than us. The writing in this is just gorgeous at times. It’s a piece of ecocriticism but flows naturally and doesn’t forget to build a story and flesh out characters on its journey. Told from multiple perspectives and mostly through vignettes but has a strong throughline. The wordly setting from Brazil, Greenland, Australia, America was beautiful and made those countries come alive in its characters. The touch of magical realism made it so fun. Thoroughly enjoyed and would recommend. Apparently its a sequel so I would possibly recommend starting with book 1 “weather woman”. Only complaint I have is that Bronwyn & Diane’s ending felt a bit undersnowed by the others.
December 1, 2021
such a beautiful book!! took me awhile to figure out what it was doing but only later realized it was a sequel. but even w/o knowing the backstory, emmons magically paints the slow burn of climate change in dazzling languages of sounds (!!), textures, and narratives of owning your power. will definitely be adding Weather Woman to my tbr ✨🥰
June 14, 2021
This is a wonderful read! I think I liked this novel even more than Weather Woman. Emmons offers us a fantastic ensemble cast of characters who discover not only their power but also their connection to the earth and each other. Highly recommended!
September 13, 2021
Gorgeous descriptions in this unique and very different book. What a way with words Emmons has. Magical realism is not usually my go to but this book is quite special.
October 25, 2024
DNF. Netflix OA, Captain Planet power rangers.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews