Will I love The Light Pirate?

At first I thought, oh, another dystopian story of the end of the world. But quickly it became thought-provoking and real, a saga of the near-future results of climate change. The hurricanes and flooding don't just send Florida back 500 yrs but worse: back to the swamps. Civilization is destroyed as most people evacuate or stubbornly try to hang onto the life they've always had. One young girl learns to survive, and her next generations hear legends of how people used to live in boxes on dry land and drink water out of pipes, and they wonder how such things… show more.

I can’t stop thinking about this book. The setting is Florida in the near future, where climate change has reached a point where the ocean is reclaiming the state. The book spans the entire life of the protagonist, Wanda. Wanda broke my heart. She suffered so much loss, none of which was her own fault. But, smart and curious, she found a way, led primarily by an older woman who took her under her wing. 

I felt for Wanda as she lost her family and friends, dealt with bullies, and lost her home. And I cheered her on when she… show more.

This riveting story takes place in near future Florida as rising water levels and crumbling infrastructure have made the state nearly uninhabitable. But Wanda, a remarkable child named after a powerful hurricane of the same name, chooses to stay and battle the elements.

I happened to read this terrifying, beautifully written novel while on vacation in Hollywood, Florida, making the dystopian future landscape terrifyingly real and easy to imagine.

The writing is gorgeous, and the author’s commentary on climate change is sobering: a true masterpiece for our time. 

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?

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