- The Good: A grief-stricken widower sets sail to metaphorically find his dead wife
- The Bad: Too on-the-nose for scifi; antagonist with no redeeming qualities
- The Literary: A book about the love of reading in a world of declining literacy
Recent widower Rainy sets sail on Lake Superior, though he hasn’t been on a boat in 15 years and never was a great sailor. Although he knows it to be logically impossible, Rainy is on a quest to find his dead wife in the Canadian Slate Islands, a place she once said doesn’t follow the normal rules of reality.
The book opens with a younger Rainy, a brutish former high-school athlete turned construction worker who finds a quiet place near his work to eat lunch. It’s a place he’s never frequented—the public library. But he overhears one of the librarians, a pretty young woman named Lark, helping other patrons, and he falls in love. Lark’s is largely absent from the novel, being dead for most of it, but you like her because she loves, collects, and sells books.
I have to admit that I was initially turned off by this book, with it’s very privileged white American viewpoint about a man going sailing to grieve. But it slowly grew on me. It’s really a retelling of traveling to the underworld and back to find a lost love. The time spent on the water is chaotic and full of turmoil, with wild winds and waves that parallel Rainy’s personal journey. The sea itself is a worthy opponent here.
Though this novel is classified as dystopian scifi, it’s pretty close to reality. The world is falling apart around Rainy, and not just because of his wife’s murder. The book is full of themes of death, and my favorite manifestation is the corpses of drowned bodies that rise to the surface of the waters warmed by climate change. This is a real phenomenon that’s used quite effectively here. Back on the mainland, illiteracy rises as billionaires who own all the mineral rights and satellite clusters and news factories and prisons and most clean water rule. Rates of suicide on the mainland are also high, and often celebrated as a chance to find something better. And because it’s a little too on the nose, I think it’s a stretch to call this scifi.
Despite being quite a downer, this book and our protagonist remain hopeful. Rainy finds people and causes to fight for, including an abused but plucky nine-year-old girl named Sol. He sees men just like him fall into traps of fear or power, each extreme results in the same end—causing pain to other humans, whether through inaction or actively putting people in a cage. Overall it’s an optimistic book about making choices everyday to do the right thing.
I really enjoy the in-book mystery about Lark’s favorite author, Molly Thorn, whose books she religiously collects. People are uncertain whether Molly herself alive or dead. Her novel titled, I Cheerfully Refused is quoted from throughout.
Unfortunately, the antagonist of the novel doesn’t quite work for me. In addition to the natural and societal circumstances, there are a single set of predators who are both responsible for Lark’s death and the poor treatment of many others who show up later on in the novel.
Recommended for those looking for an understated, quiet novel about a man’s metaphorical search for his deceased wife, with beautiful imagery, and a love for playing bass guitar or reading books.