This painful, thought-provoking apocalypse noir fires on all cylinders. Stine draws on her personal experience of today’s Appalachia to craft a harrowing vision of the future, and at its center is the tug-of-war between what is right and what is necessary to survive. “You couldn’t be picky and live” in this rotting junkyard where women are treated as disposable and life comprises a heartbreaking miasma of hunger, yearning, ruthlessness, and compassion. A trash scavenger and a strip club dancer form an alliance of necessity in a post-apocalyptic junkyard. Fall, a teacher who agrees to help Coral find her stolen son. Among the expansive cast are the good-hearted sex-workers Foxglove and Summer the vile Rattlesnake Master single mother Coral, a scavenger of plastic who makes eerie art out of garbage Coral’s lover, Trillium the idealistic reporter, Miami and the aging Mr. Recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Geographic, she has published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her first novel Road Out of Winter won the 2021 Philip K. The sordid strip club Trashlands in flood-prone “Scrappalachia” serves as the narrative hub as the novel shifts through multiple characters’ recollections and struggles. Alison Stine grew up in rural Ohio and now lives in Colorado. Dick Award winner Stine ( Road Out of Winter) sets this searing exploration of the lives of women who are mired in grinding poverty in a climate-ravaged near-future where plastic has become humanity’s only currency.
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