Nik Kroushl
I'm in a place right now where I'm trying to reckon with polycrisis and collapse. So are the characters in this book -- although they are mostly deciding not to cope or acknowledge it and instead engage in their own acts of avoidance. Their reality is also somewhat collapsing at the death of their father.
It's not really a comforting portrayal of collapse. Things get incrementally worse. The mother of two of the daughters becomes so distressed by the coming collapse -- so isolated as well in her fear of it -- that she joins a cult that believes human sacrifice will reverse the collapse.
It will not. And at the end of the book Armfield offers very little hope -- just that of having survived one terrible moment. And having to keep on in a new iteration of the endings. And deciding that life and love in the end of the world is still worth it for the sake of life and love. And that the anger we feel about what should've been, how our lives were supposed to turn out, the proverbial riches of continued existence and happiness and descendants -- that will not save us either but drive us further apart if we let it.
I'm in a place right now where I'm trying to reckon with polycrisis and collapse. So are the characters in this book -- although they are mostly deciding not to cope or acknowledge it and instead engage in their own acts of avoidance. Their reality is also somewhat collapsing at the death of their father.
It's not really a comforting portrayal of collapse. Things get incrementally worse. The mother of two of the daughters becomes so distressed by the coming collapse -- so isolated as well in her fear of it -- that she joins a cult that believes human sacrifice will reverse the collapse.
It will not. And at the end of the book Armfield offers very little hope -- just that of having survived one terrible moment. And having to keep on in a new iteration of the endings. And deciding that life and love in the end of the world is still worth it for the sake of life and love. And that the anger we feel about what should've been, how our lives were supposed to turn out, the proverbial riches of continued existence and happiness and descendants -- that will not save us either but drive us further apart if we let it.