Trashlands by Alison Stine

 

This was really not a very good novel, clearly aiming for "kaleidoscopic" and landing on "scattershot." Way too many POVs, way too many narrative threads, way too little of anything more than the vaguest of throughlines. The setting being one in which all the environmental chickens have come home to roost, specifically on the already disadvantaged, does not make things better. Thuddingly bleak and depressing, to put it kinda mildly. On the micro-level, the prose, the dialogue and all-a-that, it's not bad, though there's not much sparkle or joy to the prose (arguably, given the setting and the thuddingly bleak and depressing overall tone, sparkle and/or joy would be out of place). I see the author has won a Philip K. Dick award for another novel: Given his glaring flaws as a novelist, one should probably take any award named for him with some skepticism. I kept wanting to tap out of this novel, but I figured maybe it would go somewhere, do something, that would be worth the while. It never did.