The Ash Family

Molly Dektar’s first book is “truly a novel for our climate-anxious age,” said Julia Scheeres in The New York Times. A college-bound teenager runs away to the Carolina mountains to join a cult-like group headed by a controlling former power-plant engineer. “For a novel about an eco-terrorist cell, there is very little action,” and even the young heroine doesn’t do much besides worry. But Dektar’s “gem-cut” sentences “kept me reading.” She “clearly loves the natural world and has a gift for describing it.”