Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell

[mrissa]

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Oh, this is gorgeous. It's a novella about the world falling apart and being put back together again, all at once--there's no stage of the novella where people are not trying to hold the world together for each other. There are people saving library books from flood, planting seeds, teaching each other, making musical instruments. There are so many people going about the work of the world as best they can under difficult circumstances.

It's the shape of piece that has different characters threaded throughout, one section leading into another by theme and other elements less than by continuity of character, so even at novella length you get different angles on the same places and problems. Some of it is generational difference but some is just personal--Sophie is a different individual than Kit or Benno or any of the others, as it should be. But themes keep coming around, themes keep coming back. This is a novella that looks climate disaster in the eye and does not flinch from the harm it will do, is already doing, but also speaks to the resilience of human hope and beauty in the face of it.