Review by Booklist Review
In a future devastated by climate change, San Francisco has been totally flooded by constant rain. Bo, a young artist, remains in the city, living in a high-rise above the flooded streets, hoping to find her mother, who was carried away in a violent storm. Her cousin, who lives inland, wants her to move, but Bo delays her departure when she receives a note from her neighbor, 130-year-old Mia who refuses to join her family in Scandinavia. Mia and her daughter have a difficult relationship, so Bo becomes Mia's caregiver. As Mia relates her life, beginning in China in the 1920s, Bo finds herself inspired to paint again. When Mia's health begins to fail, Bo rushes to finish her project as she also struggles to understand why she can't leave this destroyed city. Bo and Mia's stories ask readers to see how grief, loss, and change affect people's decisions while also challenging them to look at climate change from a very personal perspective. Readers of Eric Barnes' Above the Either (2019) and Lily Brooks-Dalton's The Light Pirate (2022) will relish this thought-provoking debut.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kwan debuts with a lyrical tale of a woman's search for a better life in a near-future San Francisco deluged with never-ending rain. Bo, an artist turned caregiver, prepares to leave the city for Canada to live with relatives. Then Mia, Bo's nearly 130-year-old neighbor, slides a note under her apartment door asking for her services. Bo agrees, and the two quickly form a bond, which rekindles Bo's passion for painting and inspires her to start making a memorial to Mia comprised of drawings and photos from her life. As she immerses herself in the work, hoping to finish before Mia dies, Bo wonders whether she'll leave the city after all. In spare and sometimes enigmatic prose, Kwan offers weighty insights into the human condition: "She felt uncomfortable now, with the homesickness of someone who was home." Unfortunately, the plot is too leisurely paced, and Bo's relationship with a married man named Eddie feels somewhat superfluous and underdeveloped. Still, readers of climate fiction such as Téa Obreht's The Morningside will find much to enjoy. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT In Kwan's meditative and affecting first novel, a near-future San Francisco is plagued by flooding events. Bo, a painter and caregiver, continues to hold onto hope that her mother survived being washed away two years ago. Concerned about the city's deteriorating infrastructure, Bo hesitantly agrees to join what remains of her family in Canada, but then a note is slipped under her door, requesting her services. Bo abandons her plans to relocate and begins her tenure as caregiver to centenarian Mia. Their relationship is never easy, but a deep connection begins to grow between the two women, both of whom refuse to leave San Francisco behind. As Mia regales Bo with stories of her past, Bo's passion for art returns, and she longs to pay tribute to all 130 years of Mia's life in a memorial project, one that aims to capture both Mia and San Francisco as they were instead of as they are now. Kwan's work is a meditation on grief and loss, both of loved ones and of home, as well as on the purpose of art in the darkest of times. VERDICT Quiet but powerful, this debut will stay with readers. Recommended for general purchase, especially as a suggestion for book clubs.--Jennifer Renken
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In the last days of an American metropolis, a grieving artist finds purpose in preserving an elderly neighbor's legacy. In her marvelously graceful debut, artist and writer Kwan looks to the future with an arc of emotions ranging from existential panic to quiet moments of hope. While this gem sits firmly between the mushrooming genre of climate fiction and the more subdued melancholia ofStation Eleven orThe Dog Stars, it's very much its own creature, meditating with fresh eyes on the resilience of memory and the inevitability of time. It's become an all-too-familiar scenario in novels likeThe Mars House andNew York 2140: Here San Francisco is the drowned world where life, against all odds, goes on for now. "Everyone wanted Bo to believe that there were better places out there, places that weren't under relentless threat," Kwan explains. "They called this city a death trap. But she knew the truth: it was terrible, sometimes, everywhere." Why Bo hasn't left, long after her mother disappeared and her remaining family fled to Vancouver, she keeps mostly to herself. "If I leave," she asks, "how can I be found?" Just as she's been convinced to finally abandon her home, she gets a note under her door from Mia, one of the holdout supercentenarians in her building, who needs home care. Even as Mia's health deteriorates, connecting with her brings Bo back to the world in the wake of her grief. With the help of Antonia, a resilient and determined librarian, and Eddie, a conservation biologist, Bo sets about composing a work of art that will layer her story on top of the places and history that made the city live and breathe. What might seem at first like sacrifice is really more like endurance---holding on tight because letting everything go means losing who we are. What it means to see things through at the end of everything. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
