Realistic and fantastical individual and ecological interconnectedness (New England, Midwest, Southern, and Western US, a South Pacific island, Australia, Brazil, and the Arctic; contemporary timeframe): Cai Emmons is an extraordinary wordsmith who’s created a two-book series on the magical powers of personal relationships and their interconnected relationships with Nature, and how individuals and groups have the power to change the trajectory of the climate change crisis. Each stands alone; together their strength is multiplied so this review encompasses both.

Weather Woman, the original novel, introduces some of the same well-drawn characters you’ll find in Sinking Islands. Its focus is primarily America; the sequel expands globally.

Book 1 sets forth the fantastical plot: that someone fascinated by weather and cloud formations since childhood is so acutely sensitive to atmospheric conditions they have a supernatural ability to alter the weather. Bronwyn Artair, thirty, getting her doctorate at MIT in atmospheric sciences, is that person. Unlike anyone you’ve known or heard of, her “long, wavy, dark-red hair” makes her physically stand out, but her superhuman power makes her unique.

Bronwyn’s rare gift takes the message of what each of us could do to make any difference in reducing global warming is far-fetched, extreme, but extreme eerie weather is what’s happening around the world. Scientists have told us time is running out; not everyone is listening or feels the urgency to act aggressively like Bronwyn intensely does. Everything about these novels is intense, including Emmons’ gifted prose.

Bronwyn “does not read people as she reads the earth.” She “burns hotter” with her “gutsy, mercurial nature.” Her mother died five years ago, leaving her awfully alone. Except when she’s in Nature, the “perfect solution for soothing a human being,” when she’s not “lost in a cyclone of loneliness.” The author’s literary, poetic prose is gorgeous: sometimes expressed meteorologically.

Emmons writes about the human condition of loneliness and how the devastation of climate change has caused profound loneliness. In Sinking Islands, we’re taken to more places around the globe where climate destruction has either transformed or threatens to erase their beauty. The mood in both novels isn’t just gloom and doom, though; it’s also wonderment and awe of Nature’s therapeutic powers and why we must find therapies to save and heal our aching planet. 

If you think the premise is too wacky, too science-fiction-y, consider a proven scientific concept cited called the Butterfly Effect. The phenomenon captures Bronwyn’s moral dilemma when she finally accepts she can change weather (Book 1). The video below explains the theory as: “Small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case”:

In both novels, but more seriously in Sinking Islands, Bronwyn thinks not only of the potential benefits of her power but of unintended, harmful consequences. Described as a “thinker,” we get to see how she thinks and how her thinking evolves starting with the first time she’s done something unbelievable with a storm atop Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, famous for its extreme weather.

Initially, she thinks whatever she’d done is an aberration; we think it’s a weird coincidence. When she influences weather again, she thinks something’s wrong in her brain. When it happens again, she’s tormented by thinking she’s “coming unhinged,” having a nervous breakdown, or experiencing early onset dementia. When a witness sees how she stopped rain at a wedding, it spreads virally. Add a couple more witnesses to other weather conditions and she’s disgusted that she’s lost her privacy. Until she starts wondering could she do it again? Then tests herself in Kansas and Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley, later California’s wildfire country. Weather Woman tracks her evolution.

Sinking Islands raises the stakes from what one individual can do to experimenting with teaching others since she alone cannot possibly change the weather around the world. In Book 1 she’s “in love with the world like never before”; in Book 2 she spreads that love to a select group ripe for her interventions as they’re from beautiful places that global warming has despoiled. Their coming together isn’t just a statement about making a difference ecologically, but how doing so affects our relationships and humanity.

Weather Woman opens with Bronwyn’s doctoral studies under the mentorship of Professor Diane Fenwick, whom she’s known since she was eighteen; Diane convinced her to pursue academic science. They became very close friends; Diane loves her like the daughter and child she never had. (Happily married to Joe, a novelist who spends time in their cozy cottage in Maine to write). Mentor and mentee have two different personalities: Diane, the “extrovert” confident and commanding; “painfully shy” Bronwyn unsure of herself.

Hard sciences at an elite institution is a tough place for a woman. Bronwyn is constantly mocked by male students to such a degree that she questions and then decides she’s not cut out for academia and leaves the program to Diane’s great dismay, which continues into the sequel. Moving to southern New Hampshire to work as a meteorologist on TV, Bronwyn rents a secluded cabin in the woods overlooking a peaceful river. One day a reporter from Florida, Matt, shows up at the station and is immediately attracted to her. Their story is intense. How could it not be given Bronwyn’s intensity? Unlike Diane, a doubter of anything unless backed up by scientific data, he’s heard about Bronwyn’s otherworldly power, doesn’t believe it either but willing to turn his life upside down to be with her. Joe, whose career relies on imagination, is open-minded too, along with a few other believers appearing in one or both novels.

It’s Diane’s belief in Bronwyn that matters most. But her reaction is that this isn’t “thinking outside the-box – this is thinking outside the range of known human capability.” The reader will see whether Diane comes around or not in Sinking Islands.

Emmons, who taught creative writing and screenwriting at the University of Oregon, describes herself as a “word-lover” and “people lover” – both on full display. Sinking Islands has an even more ambitious reach than Weather Woman, but both are remarkable and thought-provoking.

The sinking island earns the title of Book 2 because it’s more momentous than a “discrete thing” as “all oceans are connected.” Located in the South Pacific, it could be any of the “islands of plastic” in which “apocalyptic” floods have washed plastics onto the shore, overwhelming sewage systems spreading “industrial chemicals, and human waste, and algae bloom, and deadly bacteria.” Two characters stand out in the island storyline: eleven-year-old Penina who has “limitless energy” like Bronwyn, and her lonely father Analu. He and Nahani, his wife, have already grieved the loss of their other two children who drowned from the high waters, so they decided to leave the island despite a dying grandmother’s wish not to. For Analu, the island has become a “winking hologram of beauty and sadness.”

A different type of “water crisis” is happening in São Paulo, Brazil. Severe drought is “squeezing the verve from everyone.” Felipe, a dancer in the theatre with the body of “Adonis,” is the central character. At forty, he’s single as dance has been his life. “Hydric collapse” means audiences are so on the edge they’re not coming to performances. This once lively city is rioting over water, diseases are spreading from standing water collected in buckets, and reservoirs are alarmingly low for a city that once owned “twelve percent of the world’s fresh water.” “Where does the soul of a city reside?”

Emmons whisks us to the Arctic Circle to draw our attention to magnitudes: survival under the most extreme weather conditions in Greenland, where the melting glaciers remind us of the butterfly effect warming Earth, affecting all of us. Except these hardy, resourceful Greenlanders still feel the “delicious joy of being alive.” Why don’t we, given all we have, the novel asks.

Although these two novels can’t provide answers, the message is we can still do something, individually and as a group. We’ll never have Bronwyn’s mythical ability to “coral” enormous concentration to release enormous energy through the body into the atmosphere, but we can make an effort that can have ripple effects.

Lorraine

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