Why did I love this book?
I've resisted ‘cli-fi’ novels thinking I didn’t want or need more post-apocalyptic doom and gloom in my head.
Finally, after feeling like I was missing out on an important cultural moment, I asked a friend who reads in this genre, and he suggested I start with Lilly Brooks-Dalton’s novel.
Set in an undefined near future, The Light Pirate is more realist than fantasy or sci-fi, but the author makes clever use of an unexplainable, possibly supernatural element to set up the novel’s central question: Are humans going to adapt to climate change or will we die off as a species?
We meet protagonist Wanda, at her untimely birth, during the destructive peak of the hurricane she's named for. Readers invest in Wanda’s unlikely survival as it quickly becomes clear that a key environmental tipping point has come and gone, wiping out her home, indeed the entire state of Florida, leaving it underwater and in the dark.
The surreal story element emerges as teenage Wanda discovers she has an unusual ability involving light. By this point, Wanda, and her older survivalist friend and found family, Phyllis, are living in a treehouse, their survival a day-to-day struggle.
With Wanda’s tragic, uncertain character arc, I took her character to represent both the innocent victims of our failure to reverse our dependence on fossil fuels—that is, the youngest among us—and the human race taking baby steps towards evolving to adapt, meaning survive.
The author’s choice to pose but not completely answer the question of whether Wanda's special ability is explainable by as yet undiscovered science or a supernatural gift, aka magic, compels the reader to deeply consider the complexity of evolutionary adaptation and our chances of meeting this challenge—and this is the hard-to-say thing in this novel—the climate apocalypse that’s coming much sooner than most of us think.
It surprised me that after reading this novel, I came away more hopeful than I’d been before.
3 authors picked The Light Pirate as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Set in the near future, this hopeful story of survival and resilience follows Wanda—a luminous child born out of a devastating hurricane—as she navigates a rapidly changing world: A “symphony of beauty and heartbreak” (Associated Press).
A Good Morning America Book Club pick · #1 Indie Next pick · LibraryReads pick · Book of the Month Club selection · Marie Claire #ReadWithMC book club selection · 2022 NPR “Book We Love” · New York Times Editors’ Choice
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches…