Brilliant and beautiful. The apocalyptic novels are getting much more interesting and diverse! ( )

An interesting read which leaves you with environmental concerns. In a fictional Florida town a family endures yet another storm losing one child and a mother giving birth during the raging hurricane . The story follows the father, remaining son and the daughter Wanda, born during the storm. Living in Rudder Florida gets increasingly difficult with storms and town services, schools, cell service everything shutting down and people evacuated . But Wanda and her dad stay. Luke moves to LA but it too is disintegrating ( by fires). Wanda is entrusted to Phylis . A scientist and survivorlest. The rest of the novel us hiw they , mostly Wanda lives in a world that is returning to water.
Really brings to life where our world could be heading. Is it an eggsageration? It’s scary to think about but recent climate change tells us it cannot be ignored . ( )

An astonishingly well written book. The author deftly weaves her story, needing not to serve an avalanche of words when a concise sentence suffices. I read this as if in a daze, fully immersed in the faltering landscape of a climate-ravaged Florida, populated with real people whose motivations are never really clear. We watch the protagonist, Wanda, as she ages from uncertain youth to confident maturity, discovering what is truly lost and what can truly be found again. ( )

Sometime in near future, Florida is disappearing, parts of it lost after every violent storm hits its shores. People are slowly leaving. In one of the small towns, a pregnant woman and her two step-sons are waiting for the arrival of another hurricane, while her husband is outside working as a lineman. This is enough of an introduction as any other info would destroy what I consider the best part of the novel.

Sometimes I feel like lately, every other book I've read is cli-fi. It is inevitable that after some time they all start feeling the same. It takes a seriously good author to set these books apart in themes, character development and plot outcomes. While I think that Lily Brooks-Dalton wrote a decent, poetic book it is still not up to par with the best genre books such as [b:Migrations|42121525|Migrations|Charlotte McConaghy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1612818084l/42121525._SY75_.jpg|65230718].

There were three main problems I had with it. The most obvious is the pacing. This book is divided into four parts. The first part was fantastic and the second part was just a little bit below that standard. But subsequent parts were progressively worse. They were much slower and what they described added very little to the story. The end was especially formulaic and disappointing.

The second problem was Wanda. I couldn't connect with her and cared very little about her throughout the novel. At first, I thought maybe she is intentionally written "at a distance" to underline her "otherness", belonging to the new world. Even the thing that made her special didn't make any sense. It was just distracting and a lazy plot device for a couple of scenes.

And the worst thing for me was the fact that the swamp setting made this so evocative of [b:Where the Crawdads Sing|36809135|Where the Crawdads Sing|Delia Owens|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1582135294l/36809135._SY75_.jpg|58589364] that I just couldn't stop comparing it to that book, which I found much, much better.

3.5 stars ( )

Almost unbearably beautiful and terrifying. ( )