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Book Reviewed by:For readers of Station Eleven and Where the Crawdads Sing comes a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman's lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality, and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world.
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state's infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.
As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.
Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time—The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.
Though climate change is a very real problem, its scope can often feel overwhelming. As is stated in Brooks-Dalton's novel, "There is a necessary tension between knowing how nature works in theory and witnessing it." Wanda's community alone is hit regularly by deadly storms, power outages, supply shortages, extreme flooding and stifling heat. By keeping the narrative set in this single location and focusing on the perspective of one family across the years, Brooks-Dalton makes their struggle to quite literally weather the storm more acutely felt. This in turn makes the potential future laid out in the novel feel all the more plausible – and the book itself all the more impactful...continued
Full Review
(603 words)
(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Climate change is an international problem but its impact can already be felt more intensely in certain areas. This is particularly true in locations that are warm and coastal, which are more susceptible to the effects of increased temperatures, rising sea levels, worsening tropical storm systems and erosion. Florida is one such example, and author Lily Brooks-Dalton explores the potential future of the climate disaster for the state's residents in her novel The Light Pirate.
As the world's oceans grow warmer and rainfall escalates, storms are able to form from greater potential energy, resulting in more intense weather systems. Florida's unique geographical location — between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean — ...
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I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking something up and finding something else ...
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Jillian Medoff, author of When We Were Bright and Beautiful
Lily Brooks-Dalton is an audacious, exquisite writer whose work pulses with humanity and hope. In The Light Pirate, her mesmerizing new novel, Brooks-Dalton achieves the impossible: she leaves us feeling grateful to be alive even as she describes, with pinpoint precision, the end of the world as we know it. Gripping, poetic, and wholly original, this book changed how I see the future. I'll never forget it.
