If ever there was a time for a book like this, it is now. You can place it into whatever genre pleases you most. Science fiction maybe, magical realism very likely, speculative fiction possibly, with a little romance perhaps, thriller, action, adventure but all with a bias towards the environmental challenges facing our planet.
So, I hear you ask, what is it all about?! Okay. To all matters blurbish…..
‘What if Mother Nature got angry? What if she got angry with all the factories and power plants and other man-made sources of climate change? What if she made it clear just how angry she was?
What if she had help?
Mary Aimsir can control the weather. So can hundreds of women like her around the world. Maybe Mother Nature is just a myth. These women aren’t.’
To begin with I was reminded a little bit of Naomi Alderman’s The Power where the central premise of that book is women having the ability to release jolts of electricity from their fingers, enabling them to be the dominant sex. The story isn’t about dominance, but it is about women having an extraordinary ability. But it’s no good having a special ability unless you use it and you use it for the greater good. And that is the intention of these extraordinary women. Doesn’t always work out in the short term. But that’s part of what makes it an engaging story. An exercise in dogged determination.
For me, good speculative fiction takes some reality that we’re familiar with then injects something beyond the actual, demands its readers conjure imagination and suspend belief for the duration of the fiction. And so for the 330+ pages James C Porter takes us to that place.
The central female character Is Mary Aimsir. One of a number of women with a very enviable and desirable ability to control the weather. But it’s not an easy task. Like many spiritual matters it’s an energy sapping process and here it’s enhanced by some electrical wizardry and indigenous crystals. And that’s where the central male character comes in – Jake - he is an electrician. But if you think I’m going to summarise the entire book, you’ve got another think coming! You need to go and read the book for yourself! And that’s not just because I ‘m mean spirited and lazy, it’s because I don’t want to spoil it for you!
We hear and we read countless times in the news of big companies and corporate organisations who don’t take their environmental responsibilities very seriously. Oer the well-being of their work forces. And we rage and fume, feeling powerless that there’s nothing we can do to bring about a change. And we wish there were. Read this book though and it makes you feel as if there is some hope, that maybe something could be done if enough people organise themselves and band together. Yes, I know this is a work of fiction, yes, I know it’s speculative, yes, I know it’s magical, but we have to hope, we have to believe in a world of infinite possibilities.
And there will be mishaps, and there will be casualties but when that is all underpinned with love and hope then maybe the good guys can win and the bad guys can lose. And there’s all of that in this story.
One thing that did bug me a bit and it’s a little bit picky. I’m a bit of a crystal anorak. And because I have a little bit of knowledge, I was desperate to know which crystals were being used in each of the different locations. . For example, Brazil is a rich source of different types of crystals, quartz, tourmaline, emeralds, aquamarine and so on. And there are those who believe that some crystals can influence or connect with weather patterns – Sunstone to summon the sunshine, amethyst to calm a storm, clear quartz for amplifying energy (my money is on clear quartz being used quite a lot in this book, just a nerdy hunch.) Yep, I’m being picky. Sorry.
I was lucky enough to receive an uncorrected proof from the book’s author via the Librarything Early Reviewers program. And I’ve devoured it all right down to the last full stop.