Subtitle: Nothing Is Promised #1
Subtitle: Nothing Is Promised #2
Recommended to me by: Author e-book giveaway
This is a hopepunk climate fiction series, four short tightly interconnected novels that take climate disaster seriously and imagine positive ways to address it. The series also takes diversity seriously, with a Puerto Rican immigrant woman scientist narrator for the first book, and a Black woman administrator for the second book. There is a secondary character in a committed homosexual relationships, although the narrators are involved in heterosexual relationships.
I enjoyed the inventiveness of the first book and the focus on found family. The narrator has a lot of angst due to losing most of her family to a pandemic, and at the same time, she’s also a capable scientist and is taking steps to improve her life.
The second book’s narrator is immersed in grief a year after losing her sister. It was disappointing to lose contact with the first book’s narrator and jump to someone she saw as an authority – but who was emotionally frozen for a lot of the book. While it may be hopepunk to imagine that a woman’s husband, children, and employer will all wait while she emotionally withdraws for a year, I didn’t enjoy reading the ongoing angst and inability to take action. Trauma freeze reactions are real and understandable, and I don’t want to spend time there for fun.
Try them out! Just be aware that there’s a big shift in tone and focus from the first book to the second one, and an ongoing mystery that presumably gets resolved in the fourth book.
Book 1 available at bookshop.org.
Book 2 available at bookshop.org.
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