I really enjoyed the first 2/3 but the last 1/3 really dragged. Also TW for anyone with an eating disorder. 

I had so many thoughts about this book it took me a long time to write about it. 

It's a first novel, and occasionally reads like it.  It's never unclear who is speaking, but it was distracting to not have quotation marks for spoken dialog and the prose was occasional unpolished. But the characters were compelling and there's a lot to think about.   I immediately asked some friends to read it so we could discuss it.

Kristina sounds exhausting.  She's the kind of person who would always have a cause and no matter what cause another person championed, while she might admit the cause was a good one, it would never be as important or righteous as her chosen cause. 

The fraught relationship between Emi and Kristina felt real to me, as did Emi's issues with food as an attempt to have some control over her own life.  

What really struck me about the book was that it seemed to have a very pre-Covid and maybe even pre-2016 leftist/progressive view of the world.  That is to say, there's a lot of focus on the CEOs of corporations (which, to be clear, are absolutely responsible for a lot of the environmental damage we're dealing with today) but very little focus on the people without a lot of political, economic or social power who also contributed to the state of things.

I keep thinking about an environmental documentary I saw at least a decade ago which featured an interview with a fisherman whose family had been supporting themselves fishing for generations.   A plant of some kind had been dumping waste into the water and killing fish to the point where it was no longer possible to make a living fishing and the fisherman's response was that he didn't like it but also he didn't believe in government regulation so he and all the other people who supported themselves fishing would just have to find another occupation. 

It's the people who refused to wear masks because not having a minor inconvenience was more important that making a small sacrifice to possibly save lives.   Those people are mostly absent from this story.   It's possible they were killed in the various calamities.  And it does seem like that much of the population having died would have created even larger generational trauma.  I think erasing them from the story lets them off the hook.  

There's also a strong sense that if everyone just banded together in solidarity there could be great change.   And that's probably true to some extent, but I think it would be even bloodier than in the book.  Incidentally, I read The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell after reading this book, and apparently The Big U from the book is actually a real thing that's planned. 

If the pandemic taught us anything, it's that creating the change needed requires a massive, planet wide effort.  It took many countries almost entirely shutting down to see the skies begin to clear and nature begin to come back.  I don't think killing CEOs or their families decades later would actually accomplish much.  No one really thinks it will happen to them, or that they won't be able to find a way out of it.

I do think that society falling back into complacency just a generation after everything happened is a very realistic take and I'm not sure how to keep that from happening.

If you want a sci fi dystopian novel that balances worldbuilding with plot and character so flawlessly that it feels real, then this is the book for you.

This is going to be a shorter review, because there isn’t much to say. I genuinely enjoyed it.

This book was dual POV, plus excerpts of fifteen year old Emi’s research project. I loved the style and formatting of this book, but the dad’s POV started to get a bit tiring after a while. Emi’s chapters were worth it, though, which might just be because I’ve lived as a fifteen year old girl but not as an older man, so her parts were more relatable and easy to follow.

The story felt full of adventure and emotional ups and downs, and now that it's done, I feel so invested in this little fictional family's fictional life that I don't know what to do with my own. I thought the story was super interesting and the world so complex and real it was honestly a little scary. I'm itching for an adventure, though. I'm inspired.

Thank you to Atria Books for an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for a review.