June 17, 2024
Hairston’s magnificent third novel in the sequence that began with Redwood and Wildfire is a multisensory plunge into a dystopian future of climate crisis and warfare over who controls the water. When told from protagonist Cinnamon Jones’s point of view, however, the plot skews cozy, focused on personal concerns about weaving meaning from history to create a coherent future. In Cinnamon’s case, this means revitalizing the Next World Festival, an annual celebration established by her elders in her youth. Almost 60 now, Cinnamon struggles to make the upcoming event worthy of this heritage. Her plotline is rendered three-dimensional by the interpolated narration of characters with fewer existential concerns but more holistic viewpoints, particularly the AIs and dogs who are her main interlocutors—and who manifestly connect, in ways Cinnamon can’t quite bring herself to trust, with the “haints” of her history. The most impressive feat here is the language; Hairston’s prose is a dynamic collage of real and invented cultures spiked with italics, inventive capitalization, and musical allusions (“Nobody rescued Cinnamon either. And Saving Your Own Self was a Hard Problem”). Ecocatastrophe and cyberthreats are familiar territory for sci-fi, but Hairston puts a beautiful twist on both in this exploration of “waiting for love to come on back in style.” Agent: Kristopher O’Higgins, Scribe Agency.
