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Starred review from April 1, 2025
In the last days of an American metropolis, a grieving artist finds purpose in preserving an elderly neighbor's legacy. In her marvelously graceful debut, artist and writer Kwan looks to the future with an arc of emotions ranging from existential panic to quiet moments of hope. While this gem sits firmly between the mushrooming genre of climate fiction and the more subdued melancholia ofStation Eleven orThe Dog Stars, it's very much its own creature, meditating with fresh eyes on the resilience of memory and the inevitability of time. It's become an all-too-familiar scenario in novels likeThe Mars House andNew York 2140: Here San Francisco is the drowned world where life, against all odds, goes on for now. "Everyone wanted Bo to believe that there were better places out there, places that weren't under relentless threat," Kwan explains. "They called this city a death trap. But she knew the truth: it was terrible, sometimes, everywhere." Why Bo hasn't left, long after her mother disappeared and her remaining family fled to Vancouver, she keeps mostly to herself. "If I leave," she asks, "how can I be found?" Just as she's been convinced to finally abandon her home, she gets a note under her door from Mia, one of the holdout supercentenarians in her building, who needs home care. Even as Mia's health deteriorates, connecting with her brings Bo back to the world in the wake of her grief. With the help of Antonia, a resilient and determined librarian, and Eddie, a conservation biologist, Bo sets about composing a work of art that will layer her story on top of the places and history that made the city live and breathe. What might seem at first like sacrifice is really more like endurance---holding on tight because letting everything go means losing who we are. What it means to see things through at the end of everything.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
April 1, 2025
Kwan debuts with a novel set in a flooded future San Francisco. After Bo's mother was lost in a storm surge, she knows she should leave the drowning city. When an elderly woman in her building wants to hire her as a caregiver, Bo decides to stay, and they forge an unexpected friendship. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
April 1, 2025
In a future devastated by climate change, San Francisco has been totally flooded by constant rain. Bo, a young artist, remains in the city, living in a high-rise above the flooded streets, hoping to find her mother, who was carried away in a violent storm. Her cousin, who lives inland, wants her to move, but Bo delays her departure when she receives a note from her neighbor, 130-year-old Mia who refuses to join her family in Scandinavia. Mia and her daughter have a difficult relationship, so Bo becomes Mia's caregiver. As Mia relates her life, beginning in China in the 1920s, Bo finds herself inspired to paint again. When Mia's health begins to fail, Bo rushes to finish her project as she also struggles to understand why she can't leave this destroyed city. Bo and Mia's stories ask readers to see how grief, loss, and change affect people's decisions while also challenging them to look at climate change from a very personal perspective. Readers of Eric Barnes' Above the Either (2019) and Lily Brooks-Dalton's The Light Pirate (2022) will relish this thought-provoking debut.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.