Thursday, September 7, 2017

"Orleans"--a book whose time has come

Click for more information on this titleHurricane after hurricane after hurricane assaults the Gulf states of the US. Damages are beyond belief. Only bottled water is safe. Sound familiar? Right now, in September of 2017, with a fierce hurricane season afflicting Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, the dystopic novel Orleans by Sherri Smith seems prophetic. In the grim world she has created, the Gulf states are so badly damaged by repeated storms that they are dissolved as governments and walled off from the rest of the country, being deemed impossible to fix and riddled with highly contagious disease. The heroine, Fen, becomes caretaker of a newborn girl after the mother dies in childbirth, and she decides to get the baby over the wall before she becomes infected.