gilda_elise

Set in the near future, this hopeful story of survival and resilience follows Wanda—a luminous child born out of a devastating hurricane—as she navigates 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.

The book is a beautifully written story of how things end. Not the end of the world, or even the end of us. What it tells is the end of a way of life; a way of life that has existed for what is, to the earth, a short span of time. Civilization slowly recedes in the climate change that man has wrought. But as things fall apart, a new way appears.

The change is seen through the eyes of Wanda, born during a hurricane of the same name, and her family: her father, his wife and two sons. And their neighbor, Phyllis, who will teach Wanda all she needs to know in order to survive. These two characters, especially, are the heart of the story.

Almost lyrical in its prose, The Light Pirate takes the reader on a journey of discovery, in what may be our own future, and does away with the flawed idea of our time that all this will only happen “after we’re gone.”

My especial gratitude to

pinstripe_bindi for recommending this book.