Jessica Bryant Klagmann

‘’I always wonder, isn’t being a good listener worth anything? Can’t you do something good for the world without standing in a crowd or shouting from a podium?’’

In a future that may not be as distant as we’d like to think, Alma returns to the island of her childhood, in East Canada, to find solace following a personal tragedy that has left her empty. In the company of the islanders and her aunt’s family, she tries to heal the wounds that have been created by loss and grief. But Nature has decided differently for the small community of Violette has been plagued by strange phenomena. Moths swarm the land, terrible storms strike hard, breaking windows, streetlamps and every glass in every house, lights flash without cause, closed flower buds open. What is worse, residents fall dead without cause and they immediately become forgotten by everyone, even their closest relations. Everyone, but Alma who has a rare gift. She can experience other people’s feelings, going through their fears and hopes, carrying their burdens on her shoulders. And all the while, the old radio tower is looming and the community is filled with the Echoes of the past, voices coming through electric appliances. As the sea level rises and rises, Alma must find the key to heal others and herself.

This is one of the most unique, haunting novels you will ever read…

‘’The sky darkened, and there was the unmistakable calm in the air, the way it felt before a storm. Another storm, right on the tail of the last one, seemed unlikely. But so far nothing about this place was predictable. An owl startled her, flying so close she felt the brush of its wings on her forehead. It landed on a branch with the body of a red squirrel clutched in its talons. The frantic silhouettes of brown bats flitted through the trees, snapping up the abundant mosquitoes.’’

I can’t say much for fear of spoiling a reading experience that must be ‘’lived’’ to become fully understood. Apart from the fact that every single paragraph is written to perfection and the characters jump right through the pages, the themes of this novel are universal and strike straight to the heart. Loss, sorrow, despair, the urge to help, the fight to heal yourself and others, the feeling of hopelessness when you know that you are battling against an enemy that cannot be defeated. And yet, you refuse to give in. You write stories to make the lives of others known, to preserve their existence, to understand your own course through the journey of a community trying to swim against a vicious current.

‘’How many times did you sit in a room and try and fail to understand yourself? A hundred? A thousand? You felt your own energy, your thoughts and emotions, all bouncing around, seemingly disconnected vibrations, and you could never quite pin them down or predict what they would do next. You could never tell when they would begin, or from which direction they would come, or when they would fade, or if they would simply cease abruptly, without warning.’’

‘’Sometimes the impossible still happens to be the thing that makes the most sense.’’

Alma is Latin for ‘’soul’’ and she is the soul of this beautiful novel. Observant, sensitive, quiet, astute, deeply compassionate, intelligent, she is the perfect main character and our guide in this special journey. Her strength makes her a true example to be followed. It is such a joy to witness her determination to narrate the stories of her friends, to keep their memory alive amid bitter goodbyes and growing uncertainty while searching into the void for her beloved without losing her shrewdness and her kindness for a single minute, something so rare in today’s literature that wants the majority of ‘heroines’ behaving as stupid as it gets to make them ‘strong’ and ‘feminist’. Spare us…Alma is not afraid to assert her right to fight against time and space - quite literally - and refuses to accept defeat. The end may be inevitable but what better way to exit according to our rules? The rest of the characters are also a joy to read, deeply humane, kind, realistic. A cast that is a breath of fresh air, despite the ‘heavy’ themes of the novel.

‘’The past is where I live and I like it that way,’’ she said flatly. ‘’Everything that really matters to me is in the past.’’

At times reminding me of the excellent film Frequency, starring Jim Caviezel, this novel is a tranquil, tender, bittersweet whisper into the void that has been Contemporary Literature of late. Without the need for gimmicks, rich in an unsettling, eerie - almost supernatural - feeling guided by incorporeal voices and the wings of Death that we cannot escape, Jessica Bryant Klagmann has written an elegy for a planet on the verge of destruction and a hymn to the fighting spirit, the resilience and the gentleness of the human soul.

‘’We heard it, and we felt it, the pulse of a dying planet that had stories it could no longer tell on its own. It was beautiful and comforting, that rhythm - suffused with pieces of everyone and everything we had loved - but it was also broken.’’

Many thanks to Lake Union Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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