The Worst What-Ifs

Frontlist

Land of Milk and Honey by C

Pam Zhang

(Riverhead Books, Literary/ Speculative Fiction, September 2023)

SYNOPSIS: Set sometime in the future, pollution has dramatically increased in the world, inducing significant changes in the climate and rendering most crops ungrowable. Food manufactured from gray mung bean flour is essentially just for sustenance, not flavor or enjoyment. So, when an opening for a chef at a highly secretive research community high in the mountains somewhere along the border of France and Italy appears, the narrator lies about who she is to get the job. Her willingness to pretend to be someone else is actually a selling point for her future employer and it won’t be the last time her identity is in question.

As the chef starts to feel more and more trapped in the community, the highly questionable ethics of the leaders come to light, and she has to weigh the benefits of having access to food she thought she’d never see again against the guilt of knowing how the rest of the world is barely surviving.

WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT: The initial hook of a future where a chef will go to great lengths to taste something green again. It’s a startling premise—thinking of a world where the climate has changed so drastically as to almost entirely eliminate fresh foods from the diets of everyone except for the wealthiest people who’ve absconded to remote, heavily protected locales, is fairly miserable to consider. As someone who takes great joy in freshly prepared foods, I needed to see how that would play out. And, in true speculative fiction form, I couldn’t have begun to imagine where this story would eventually lead.

Additionally, Zhang does a brilliant job of showcasing how cutthroat the über-wealthy could be as they pick and choose who offers the most value to them—not in terms of money, but rather in terms of accessing specific resources and knowledge—when trying to survive what could be the end of the world. It’s disturbing, but not at all hard to imagine. The sinister feeling builds slowly from the early pages as readers try to figure out their end goal because no amount of money can save them from a world that can’t sustain life … right?

Backlist

The Displacements by Bruce Holsinger

(Riverhead Books, Literary Fiction, July 2022)

SYNOPSIS: The world’s first category six hurricane barrels toward Miami and entirely uproots the lives of the Larsen-Hall family. Prior to this, Daphne and Brantley appeared to be a mostly happy couple with mostly successful careers and a mostly stable blended family. But in the chaos of the emergency evacuation,

a confluence of what would be, under normal circumstances, minor annoyances (leaving one’s purse at home, a low fuel tank, cell phone troubles) turns into a life-and-death situation. Without any cash and no access to her debit or credit cards, Daphne tries to contact Brantley at the hospital where he works only to discover he’s disappeared in the evacuation and is presumed dead. With no other options, Daphne and the kids end up on a bus to a FEMA megashelter for the displaced.

Initially, the camp is a godsend, but as the recovery drags on and the TV crews shift attention to the next big story, those living in the camp feel increasingly abandoned, taken advantage of, and desperate to get some semblance of their lives back.

WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT: Just as in his 2019 novel The Gifted School, Holsinger astutely brings to the foreground the racial and class differences that make up the United States. The megashelter becomes a microcosm of American society on the whole, showing how, even after losing everything, people will find ways to create hierarchies according to race, ethnicity, political beliefs, and who is most willing to claw their way to the top by whatever means necessary.

To create that part of the story, Holsinger also shows the gamut of emotions that arise when you realize just how easy it is to lose everything you’ve worked for. When disaster strikes, all it takes is something as simple as a purse left in a driveway to erase your identity, thereby eliminating your means of caring for your family. And when masses of people fleeing the same disaster are all at the mercy of unfeeling insurance companies and overworked/ understaffed government agencies, finding your way back to that life can feel all but impossible.

Finally, while Hurricane Luna is what sets the story in motion, its wider effects on Miami and the U.S. are not the story—what happens to Daphne and her family in the megashelter is. Yet, nothing happens in a vacuum and as a reader, it’s hard not to wonder what’s happening beyond the borders of the displacement camp. So to satisfy that curiosity while also creating page-turning suspense, Holsinger strategically places interstitials throughout the book, things like podcast transcripts, web pages, senate committee testimonies, and maps tracking the routes taken by displaced people, which help create a more complete picture of the effects of this disaster and build tension when things at the camp hit a boiling point. WD