Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

I love this novel.

I love the writing, its beauty and quality, the slow reveal of backstory, the melding of the personal and communal crises.

I love the chilling portrayal of a near-future world devastated by climate change and human greed.

I loved the strength of will of the fragile and broken protagonist, Franny.

I love the love story of Franny and Niall, how they hold each other close while letting each other go.

I love the adventure, the chase, how Franny choses the impossible and survives.

I love that the novel made me cry. And think. And love it.

Five Stars. Read it.

I won a free ebook from a publisher giveaway. My review is fair and unbiased.

Migrations
by Charlotte McConaghy
Flatiron Books
Pub Date August 4, 2020
ISBN: 9781250204028
hard cover $26.99 (USD)

from the publisher

For readers of Flight Behavior and Station Eleven, a novel set on the brink of catastrophe, as a young woman chases the world’s last birds—and her own final chance for redemption.

Franny Stone has always been a wanderer. By following the ocean’s tides and the birds that soar above, she can forget the losses that have haunted her life. But when the wild she loves begins to disappear, Franny can no longer wander without a destination. She arrives in remote Greenland with one purpose: to find the world’s last flock of Arctic terns and follow them on their final migration. She convinces Ennis Malone, captain of the Saghani, to take her onboard, winning over his eccentric crew with promises that the birds she is tracking will lead them to fish.

As the Saghani fights its way south, Franny’s new shipmates begin to realize that she is full of dark secrets: night terrors, an unsent pile of letters, and an obsession with pursuing the terns at any cost. When the story of her past begins to unspool, Ennis and his crew must ask themselves what Franny is really running toward—and running from.

Propelled by a narrator as fierce and fragile as the terns she is following, Migrations is both an ode to our threatened world and a breathtaking page-turner about the lengths we will go for the people we love.

"As beautiful and as wrenching as anything I've ever read...Extraordinary." —Emily St. John Mandel

"I recommend Migrations with my whole heart." —Geraldine Brooks

The Story of More by Hope Jahren

Having hope requires courage.~from The Story of More by Hope Jahren

Succinct, well organized, and with a powerful narrative that is engrossing and accessible, The Story of More crunches down what I have read in numerous books into 224 pages.

Author Hope Jahren, author of the best-selling memoir Lab Girl, based the book on her climate change classes.

"All of this has convinced me that it's time to bring global change out of my classroom and into this book," Jahren writes in the introduction. "So if you'll listen, I'll tell you what happened to my world, to your world--to our world. It changed."

She starts at the very beginning--the fact that humans are on this earth and that our population is continually growing. Following a logical narrative, Jahren covers how we get our food and our growing energy use and the changes we have wrought on earth.

Along the way she points out that we have enough of everything but it is not shared equitably. Millions live without enough food, clean water and other things some of us take for granted. And millions of us spend money on things we don't need, wasting the clean water and energy available.

Scientists have been aware for nearly my entire lifetime that our dependence on fossil fuels was a problem. We have seen the environmental damage caused by human activity, including factory farms and our dependence on gasoline fueled cars and air travel. We know that the sea level is rising  and glaciers and the polar ice caps are melting.

Jahren concludes with actions we can all take.

First, we must determine our personal values. Learn what you can about what you value. Are your personal activities in line with those values? What about your personal investments--are they in line with your values? How we spend our money and how we invest our money should reflect what we believe. Share your values with institutions to pressure change.

Americans can make a huge impact. Every step we take to limit our energy use and reduce our consumption makes an impact. We can't give up. We can do with less.

Do not be seduced by lazy nihilism.~ from The Story of More  by Hope Jahren

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read an excerpt or hear an audio excerpt at
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/575671/the-story-of-more-by-hope-jahren/

from the publisher

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before. She explains the current and projected consequences of global warming—from superstorms to rising sea levels—and the actions that we all can take to fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of global change and a lively, personal narrative given to us in Jahren’s inimitable voice, The Story of More is the essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it.

The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
by Hope Jahren
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pub Date March 3, 2020
ISBN: 9780525563389
$15.00 (USD) hardcover

The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde

They were childhood friends who become lovers.

He wanted a comfortable life.

She wanted to save the world.

Would their love survive?

The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde is a compelling dystopian novel and a warning. It is also a heartbreaking story of lovers torn asunder by social forces.

The exotic pristine beauty of Norway is the symbol of the beauty and perfection of the world--which humankind is willing to sacrifice to continue an unsustainable lifestyle.

Signe's mother was willing to destroy their Norweigan habitat so the community could progress and thrive by the diversion of the river into a power plant. Her family hotel needed this to survive.

Signe's father protested the loss of the water ouzel, a tiny mollusk that cleaned the water and lived 100 years, and the natural beauty of the River Breio and its waterfall. He and Magnus's father tried to stop the plan. They failed.

At university, Signe and Magnus become lovers and seem to be following in their father's footsteps in protecting the environment. But Magnus opts instead for the status quo--a good life--working for Signe's mother. Signe leaves him.

Years later Signe learns that Magnus is harvesting the glaciers and selling the ice. It is time for one more act of resistance.

The legacy of their actions will impact future climate refugees David and Lou. In 2041, France is burning and the family flees. In the turmoil, David and his daughter Lou are separated from his wife Anne and their infant son. They travel to a refugee camp, at first an oasis of order providing basic needs. Later, things tumble into chaos.

This grim warning on the natural outcome of climate change also offers hope in the healing forgiveness of love.

I received a free ARC from the publisher through Bookish First in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The End of the Ocean
by Maja Lunde
translated by Diane Oatley
Harper Via
On Sale: 01/14/2020
hard cover $27.99
ISBN: 9780062951366
ISBN 10: 006295136X

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Overstory by Richard Powers was on my TBR bookshelf and when I saw it was the November choice for the Now Read This online book club, sponsored by the PBS Newshour and the New York Times Book Review, I decided to participate.

In The Overstory, Powers gives readers nine characters whose stories entwine over the course of the novel. Each has an experience that alters their awareness, motivates them to resist the status quo, and for some, culminating in acts of eco-terrorism.

Trees, forests, ecosystems, nature--these are the stunning stars of the novel, that which gives meaning to our assorted human characters and spurs their community. They are described in gorgeous, vivid language.

It is a testament that this novel made me reconsider my personal choices. I have read nonfiction books about climate change, rising waters, the impact of animal farming, the ways we need to alter how we live. But this novel had me second-guessing my choices.

We are installing new carpeting and porcelain tile to repace vinyl tile and an awful maroon carpet. What environmental damage am I causing because I want a prettier home? 

"We have a Midas problem. There's no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity," says the creator of an alternate reality online computer game. But he was talking to me and you.

I look at the paper towels and the paper napkins on my countertop and shudder. What about the very book I read, made of paper? Yes! It is recycled paper, saving 657 trees with the first printing! AND 614,962 gallons of water, 206,700pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, 62,925 pounds of solid waste. We CAN DO BETTER!

"The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story," one of the characters states.

The Overstory is that kind of story. It can change your mind.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Overstory
by Richard Powers
W. W. Norton
$18.95 paperback

Fatler by Bill McKibben

"Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question."~ Falter by Bill McKibben

I was a teenager in the late 1960s when I read Ayn Rand's novels. I was still reading for story and too young to understand Rand's philosophy. I never returned to reread her books. Bill McKibben's Falter has educated me on Rand and the impact of her ideas on shaping the world we live in today.

The list of Rand-inspired movers and shakers is impressive: Alan Greenspan was a personal friend of Rand and people who revere Rand include Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Paul Ryan, Rex Tillerson, Ronald Reagan, Mike Pompeo, Ray Dalio (a Trump confidant), and Donald Trump. 

Rand called her philosophy 'objectivism,' which is really libertarianism. It's anti-government, believing there should be no limits on the individual's self-interest and quest to personal achievement. There is no consideration of the needs of others, the people who can't or won't do for themselves, those leeches on society. Don't limit my rights and privilege for the common good and tax my wealth for the government to give to those people.

It is a philosophy readily adopted by business. Unimpeded growth without restraints is the goal of capitalism. Drill for all the oil and dig for all the coal anywhere, without limit. It's someone else's problem to clean up any mess we create. Too bad if we contaminate the water or air or devastate the land or cause earthquakes.

Right-wing politicians love Rand; don't tax me to pay for programs that benefit the losers; small government is good government. This leads to obscenely rich business owners, like the Koch brothers, funneling money to right-wing politicians who will protect their interests.

Then there are the Silicon Valley visionaries funding research into aging and how to live forever and genetic engineering and the creating of AI. 

Are these good things? Will these technologies improve human life? Or will they create a larger socio-economic divide, even a separation between regular humans and improved humans? What would a world without death look like? Would those living suppress the number of humans to be born?

McKibben asks, has the 'human game' begun to 'play itself out?' Has our progress advanced to the point that we are negatively impacting our species? Is continual growth sustainable? Growth in technology, wealth, improvement via genetic engineering?

Can we alter climate change? Will we slow down growth to a sustainable rate? Will we put our effort into renewable energy? We are the only species on Earth that can place limits on ourselves, band together to achieve outcomes that improve our mutual community. But...will we? Or will humanity's future look like the movie Wall-E, brain-dead screen-addicts floating in space while a robot runs our lives?

"There are people who...hate the idea of society, who organize campaigns against public transit, who try to dismantle public schools and national parks, who instinctively head for the gated enclave. I don't think their rule will last forever...but they currently possess a savage leverage, perhaps power enough to end the human game...

"The endless efforts to gerrymander districts, suppress voting, race-bait, gin up cynicism in our politics, confuse us about issues such as climate change--these are nothing more than efforts to weaken society so it can't exert power over its most dominant individuals."~from Falter by Bill McKibben

Will the pendulum be swung away from disaster by nonviolent activism and a WWII era rise in commitment to the common good--fighting for our lives? Our fate is in our hands.

I received a free book from the publisher through LibraryThing. My review is fair and unbiased.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Henry Holt
$28 hardcover
ISBN:978-1-250-17826-8

Falter is a brilliant, impassioned call to arms to save our climate from those profiting from its destruction before it’s too late.—Jane Mayer, bestselling author of Dark Money

We Are The Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer

This week Greta Thunberg's impassioned accusation, "you have stolen my dreams and my childhood" by talking about "money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth," brought many to tears...and others to attack the sixteen-year-old activist. We don't want to hear Thunberg because we don't want to accept her vision of the future.

We have heard the reasoned arguments and warnings. Most people accept climate change as scientific fact. In the popular film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warned, "We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource." But the political will has not been there and many deny the scientific studies as fable.

The first Earth Day I purchased a "Give Earth a Chance" pinback button at the information table set up in my high school hallway. I took ecology in college, recycled when we had to cart everything to centers, limited the use of our car (when we turned in our lease we had totaled 8,000 miles over three years).

"Most people want to do what's good for the world, when it doesn't come at personal expense."~from We Are The Weather

But we also eat eggs and cheese and use the air conditioner and furnace. Some things are easier to give up, and some things we cling to. I can't tolerate high temperatures and without air conditioning, I am a mess. Michigan has experienced more 95 degree days than ever, and we are told it will get worse. I think about it all the time, how we may need to install a bathroom in the basement when we need to escape to its coolness because the a.c.will be illegal or limited or unaffordable.

In We Are The Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, Jonathan Safran Foer argues that people just don't "feel" the threat of climate change; we think of it as some apocalyptic fantasy set in the future. Like Justice Felix Frankfurter when he learned of the Warsaw Ghetto and concentration camps responded, "I must say I am unable to believe what you told me...My mind, my heart, they are made in such a way that I cannot accept it."  The good justice believed, and he was horrified, but it was too much for him to fathom it was real.

Foer's book is, in essence, a long discussion with us, and himself, on how difficult it is to get to where Thunberg is: a deep commitment based on a sense of personal and existential threat of death.

We are killing ourselves. We are committing suicide. We can change our behavior and it can affect the weather and, perhaps, save our lives, our children's lives.

Foer offers individuals how to change the future through personal action. Walk, bicycle, instead of using cars. (check; my husband walked to work much of his career.) Avoid flying (check; I've only flown a few times my entire life), have one child less (check; we have one). Dry clothes on a clothesline instead of in a dryer. (Done that, had the stiff underwear to prove it. But I do have an energy-efficient dryer.)

And eat a plant-based diet (kinda, sometimes).

Our first year of marriage we bought Diet For a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe. Some of those recipes remain regular favorites in our house, such as Mexican Pan Bread. Later we collected Moosewood Restaurant's cookbooks and added more delicious recipes. We fell into the cooking of our childhood when raising a picky-eater child. But after he left for college, I read Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma and we became strict vegetarians for three years...then, living with our son again fell back into buying more meat.

I am now in a dilemma. We are trying to get animal products back out of our diet, but I am told to increase my protein. I don't like tofu or those awful shakes. I have been buying local eggs from a farm market--is that ok? Then, there is my husband's deep and abiding love for cheese.

Foer informs that agriculture, mostly animal agriculture, accounts for 24% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. And we know those animals require huge amounts of food which takes up lots of land and energy and water, and factories to process animals into meat, and trucks to get the meat to markets. Plus, factory farming of animals creates environmental problems and pollution. Last of all, eating animal products, as my doctor has emphasized, is bad for our individual health.

Where is the 'upside' of eating meat?

It appears to come down to grilled steaks taste so good vs. save our life and humanity.

"We are the flood, and we are the ark," Foer concludes. Our fate is in our own hands.

And so we struggle on to overcome our desires and the ease of tradition as our children accuse our complacency costs their future.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub Date 17 Sep 2019
ISBN 9780374280000
PRICE $25.00 (USD)

Morality and the Environmental Crisis by Roger S. Gottlieb

Deeply thoughtful and reasoned, Morality and the Environmental Crisis by Roger S. Gottlieb is a profound work that draws from all areas of human thought and experience.

Gottlieb proposes an argument then offers the counterarguments in a complex ladder of understanding that is nevertheless so well presented that the reader can follow the progression of thought.

Some years ago I participated in a small group study on energy use and climate change. The participants were all of a like mind and voiced frustration with 'those people' who remained unresponsive to arguments to change their lifestyle. The antagonism and anger weighed heavy in the air.

We cannot change the world or even change all the people around us.

We can only do what we can do. I have used tote bags for shopping for years. I have decided to make bags for produce instead of using the plastic ones at the stores. I have recycled glass and cans and paper for forty-seven years. I rarely buy red meat. When we turned in our leased car we had clocked only 10,000 miles over three years. We insulated our house and bought all LED bulbs. We compost and avoid pesticides.

It isn't enough.

We support candidates that work to save the Great Lakes and who are concerned with climate change.

It isn't enough.

As Gottlieb writes, we are still complicit--I am still complicit.

I buy yards of cotton fabric to make quilts as a creative outlet--cotton that requires fertilizers and pesticides and factories to make it into fabric and chemicals to treat it and trucks to get it to the quilt shop. Just so I can cut it up and sew it into something new, tossing the bitty scraps into the trash that goes into a landfill.

I am part of the problem. We all are. Our entire society, economy, and culture make us so. As a society, we are more interested in technology than nature. Jobs instead of preservation. Maintaining our lifestyle than worrying about oil spills somewhere else.

We need widespread collective and political action to change society. Maybe it can happen--we got a man on the moon and people sacrificed to support the war effort during WWII. Nothing less can alter the course we are headed on.

I continue to do what I can because it feels like a moral imperative, like not leaving untended fires in the forest or tossing trash along the roadside, a habit based in reason and science and tradition and personal values.

Do we love nature enough--know nature personally enough to care to preserve it? Not just the puppy mill dogs and the lab rabbits, but also the forests and the marshlands?

How can we save the natural world from our collective brutality if we do not love it? If we do not know it, how can we love it? and if everything else--work, ease, moral limits, the dominant institutions of our society--removes us from it? from Morality and the Environmental Crisis

Gottlieb ends the book by employing the ageless use of story to show the choice we each must make: we can embrace despair or gratitude. Gratitude does not negate despair, it makes life worth living in the face of awful realities.

Learn more about the book and author and see the table of contents at
https://www.kriso.ee/cambridge-studies-religion-philosophy-society-morality-db-9781316506127.html

I was given access to a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Morality and the Environmental Crisis
by Roger S. Gottlieb
Cambridge University Press
Pub Date 02 Apr 2019 
ISBN 9781316506127
PRICE $29.99 (USD)

The Right to be Cold: One Woman's Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change

The Right To Be Cold is Sheila Watt-Clouier's biography, concentrating on her life's work to protect the Inuit culture and the Arctic. She is inspiring and courageous.

She shares her story of growing up in Nunavik, learning her people's traditional way of life, hunting and preparing 'country food'. Young people were taught how to survive in the harsh climate. Igloos were stronger than tents and offered protection from both weather and polar bears. Sled dogs were smart and capable and reliable.

Then she was sent to the 'South' for her education and was exposed to modern, Western life. She lost fluency in her native language.

Returning to her Arctic home she became involved in education. She saw how Southern colonialism was destroying her people's culture, resulting in a rise of addiction and suicides.

Sheila became an activist for her people, first in education and culture preservation, and later in the environment and climate change. The warming of the Arctic, caused by Southern use of fossil fuels, also means the destruction of her people's way of life, the animals they depend upon, and the very land
    they live on. Her work led to being considered for the Pulitzer Prize.

Sheila's childhood memories offer a great understanding of her native culture, and her early experience in the South informs readers how traditional knowledge is lost. Her chapters on her activism and achievements are detailed and sometimes overwhelming; I can't imagine how she maintained the energy and strength to do what she has done.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change

by Sheila Watt-Cloutier

University of Minnesota Press

Publication Date: May 1, 2018

Paperback $22.95

ISBN: 9781517904975

from the publisher:
For the first ten years of her life, Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled only by dog team. Today there are more snow machines than dogs in her native Nunavik, a region that is part of the homeland of the Inuit in Canada. In Inuktitut, the language of Inuit, the elders say that the weather is Uggianaqtuq—behaving in strange and unexpected ways.

The Right to Be Cold is Watt-Cloutier’s memoir of growing up in the Arctic reaches of Quebec during these unsettling times. It is the story of an Inuk woman finding her place in the world, only to find her native land giving way to the inexorable warming of the planet. She decides to take a stand against its destruction.

The Right to Be Cold is the human story of life on the front lines of climate change, told by a woman who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most influential Indigenous environmental, cultural, and human rights advocates in the world. Raised by a single mother and grandmother in the small community of Kuujjuaq, Quebec, Watt-Cloutier describes life in the traditional ice-based hunting culture of an Inuit community and reveals how Indigenous life, human rights, and the threat of climate change are inextricably linked. Colonialism intervened in this world and in her life in often violent ways, and she traces her path from Nunavik to Nova Scotia (where she was sent at the age of ten to live with a family that was not her own); to a residential school in Churchill, Manitoba; and back to her hometown to work as an interpreter and student counselor.

The Right to Be Cold is at once the intimate coming-of-age story of a remarkable woman, a deeply informed look at the life and culture of an Indigenous community reeling from a colonial history and now threatened by climate change, and a stirring account of an activist’s powerful efforts to safeguard Inuit culture, the Arctic, and the planet.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

Jeff Goodell traveled the world to report on how rising sea levels are impacting human society across the globe. His new book The Water Will Come takes readers to shrinking Alaskan glaciers with President
Obama and into the flood-prone homes of impoverished people living in Lagos, Nigeria.

"By that time, I'll be dead, so what does it matter?" Quote from a Florida real estate developer, The Water Will Come 

I long wondered how bad it would get before people broke down and changed how we live and do things. I consider how Americans gave up comforts during WWII rationing, all pulling together for a great cause we all believed in. I don't see that happening today.

As Goodell points out, "fossil fuel empire" Koch industries money has swayed government. Private citizens can recycle and lower the heat and ride bicycles but the impact is small. As long as governments are more worried about big business than national security endangered by climate change we can't alter what is coming.

What? you ask; national security?

Well, consider that military bases across the nation and world are located in areas that WILL FLOOD. Like the Norfolk Naval Base, the Langley Air Force Base, and NASA's Wallops Flight Facility! Along with the financial district of New York City and expensive Florida beach front homes, we will be losing the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site in the Marshall Islands, where 12,000 Americans operate space weapons programs and track NASA research.

So if the loss of Arctic ice and habitat and the Inuit way of life doesn't concern you, perhaps this information will.

So many issues are raised in the book. Consider: We have not established how to deal with climate change refugees. Where are these people going to go? Countries in Europe, along with the U.S.,  are closing borders--the same countries whose fossil energy use is the primary cause of climate change behind rising sea levels! What is their responsibility?

There are a lot of ideas of how to deal with rising sea levels, including the building of walls and raising cities. It seems, though, that people are more interested in coping with the change than addressing the root cause of climate change. We just don't want to give up fossil fuels.

The book is highly readable for the general public. Although the cover photo made me think of an action disaster movie, the books is a well-researched presentation of  "fact, science, and first-person, on-the-ground journalism."

I received a free book from the publisher through Goodreads.

Hear an interview with Goodell with NPR at https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559736126/climate-change-journalist-warns-mother-nature-is-playing-by-different-rules-now

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
by Jeff Goodell
Little, Brown & Company
$17.95
ISBN-13: 9780316260206

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

The End We Start From arrived at my door and before day was over I had read the book. It is a small volume, sparsely worded, but thick with meaning.

Megan Hunter's first novel can be read as an homage to motherhood. Pregnancy and a child's growth and the bonds of baby and child are vivid and visceral, honest and truthful. I knew this journey.

"Pregnancy was the great adventure." The End We Start From

It is a dystopian story of a climate catastrophe causing mass migration, refugees seeking safety. Soon after the birth of their baby, a family flees rising flood waters that are overwhelming London. The father takes them north. As panic and disorder follows, the family retreat further from civilization. They find shelter in a refugee camp. They become separated.

There is a layer of symbolic meaning. The title, The End We Start From, comes from lines in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. It is my favorite Eliot poem.

What we call the beginning is often the endAnd to make an end is to make a beginning.The end is where we start from.

The story is told in a few short sentences grouped together and separated by asterisks, as if we hear the mother's spoken thoughts. Interspersed are italicized sentences, seeming quotations, that relate snippets of creation stories. Many readers will recognize the Judeo-Christian references to the Creation of the World, Adam and Eve, and Noah and the Flood.

Universal archetypes appear: references to world Creation Myths of emergence from water or a world egg, the symbolism of womb and a child's birth, the creation of  land and mankind, myths of paradise.

The structure of the novel may confuse some readers who prefer a strong narrative or character-driven story. But, if they give the novel a chance, these readers can relate to the story of a mother's love and the joys and concerns of motherhood.

The need to leave home for safety is, sadly, also too universal. Just consider the recent hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires.

And, Hunter has another message for us: When our lives seem to be torn asunder, and we have lost everything, there comes a child taking its first step. We know what we have lost. This child only will know the world as it is. The child is a new beginning.

Life is not linear, going from worse to better. Life is nothing but endings and starting over. We lose a loved one, a career, a home, mobility.

A child is born. Flood waters arose and covered London. People flee and gather to survive. The child grows. The waters recede. The people return. Nothing is the same. Life goes on.

I truly believe that Earth is changing and humans will suffer. Local climate changes will mean some crops fail and other will thrive, new species will move in and others will move out. Humans will migrate. There will be social, political, and economic stress. There will be violence and disorder. There will be an ending to the time we have flourished in, this interglacial period. There will be a new beginning, one born in violence of the death of all we have known. Somewhere, a baby will take it's first step into it's mother's arms.

It is the end we start from.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley and an ARC through Goodreads giveaway in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.



The End We Start From
by Megan Hunter
Grove Atlantic/Grove Press
Pub Date: November 7, 2017
Hardcover $22.00
ISBN: 9780802126894


Hear T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets read by Alec Guinness at
https://soundcloud.com/tomrobinson/4quartets