Pluto Cove, by Arran Forbes

We interrupt the saga of my life to bring you a book review.

I started reading Aaron Forbe's Pluto Cove on my return trip from Boston to Anchorage this summer. I read nonstop the entire flight home, absorbed in the story of Enna Martinez, and her family's escape to their seaside cabin in the woods during an apocalyptic event dubbed the Polar Storms.

In this fictional debut, worldwide drought affects the entire globe because for reasons no one can explain all the rainstorms gravitate to the North and South Poles. Water reservoirs disappear, rivers run dry, taps stop working. At first communities work together to face the crisis, but like in our current pandemic, soon divisions, anger, and finger-pointing emerge.

A mysterious figure named Cloudburst claims that the few rainstorms that do fall between the poles only grace communities with "true Americans", and despite the lack of science to support his findings, he soon gathers hoards of followers hungry for someone to blame. They call themselves the LFR (Let Freedom Rain) and soon begin rounding up immigrants and sending them to detention centers, where they are never seen or heard from again.

Enna Martinez, our narrator, is a young teenager living in Anchorage, Alaska, when the Polar Storms begin. She is more focused on her soccer games and classmates than on the world news, but her mother Lisa, prone to anxiety after her "accident" years before, begins stockpiling supplies in their small cabin in Pluto Cove across the bay from Homer. Once a week, she fills their van with supplies--clothes, canned food, drought-resistant seeds-- and drives Enna's younger sister, Callie, not yet school-aged, down and back. This hoarding behavior worries her practical physician husband, Alex, who believes the rain will return and the LFR won't make an appearance in Alaska.

Alex was born in Mexico and migrated to the U.S. with his mother as a child. Enna inherited his dark skin and hair; her younger sister Callie received their mother's blond locks and fair skin. In a scene early on in the book, Alex tries to talk to Enna about this difference:

He sighed. "It's hard sometimes, Enna. I guess I feel like you should know that. You gotta be tough. You gotta be sure of yourself. Because everyone else is going to second guess you. Going to think you're less than. Because you look like you come from a different place."

"I'm a fourth generation Alaskan," I chirped, repeating a fact Mom taught me about her side of the family, a fact that impressed a great number of people. Most non-native people living in Alaska were new. Like Dad.

"You are," he said affirmatively. "You are, and it's amazing. But you are also Mexican. And I hope you think that's pretty cool too."

I nodded passively, staring out the window. I didn't think it was cool, but I wasn't going to show Dad that. He meant his talks to empower me, but too often they filled me with shame. Instead of making me feel confident, they internalized in me a bigotry that made me feel weak, defeated, and inferior.

As a multi-racial family, Lisa worries they will be targeted by the LFR, despite her husband's optimism.  I'm not a freak. I am not ill, Lisa repeats, as a mantra, when Alex questions her sanity. Enna just wants to fit in with her light-skinned friends and wants her life to continue as normal; but when the Martinez family wakes up to a Cloudburst symbol painted on their garage door, they load up their dog Benji, their chickens, as much supplies as they can stuff into their van and make the drive down Turnagain Arm to their getaway cabin in Pluto Cove.

The world we knew had crumbled. A shift in global order on the magnitude of a change in gravity or plate tectonics--the very things that anchor us to solid ground. We drove away from our sky blue home that day, from our swings in the yard, from our bikes piled in the garage, from the tick marks of my and Callie's growth etched on the wall at the bottom of the staircase, with no idea of when we would return.

Enna struggles with the transition from sleepovers and school hallways to traplines and isolation. She feels as though her mother's psychosis led them there and not the bigger world events that affected their family. Enna narrates the story from sometime in the future, and because of this perspective of time she is able to reflect on her own adolescent shortcomings:

Things were bad on the mainland. I could understand that. But to me nothing could be worse than being forcibly outcast by my parents. I knew it was selfish and nearsighted--even an undeveloped brain could see that--but it overwhelmed me.

Hunger and loneliness pervade their days as they learn to adjust to life without grocery stores, internet or neighbors. You would think this forced survivalism would be the hardest hurdle they face, but when the Birds arrive, a vicious gang of brothers, it turns out humans can be scarier than the wilderness.

When Callie goes missing, something we know as readers will happen from the first sentence of the book--Callie was six when she disappeared from the blueberry patch-- the grief Enna felt at losing her friends is nothing compared to the loss of her baby sister.

The day I lost her, the wildfire smoke had turned the blue sky to brown. The air we breathed had the texture of gravel and I tried to pull it back as though it were a curtain I could throw open into another clear-eyed world. But there was no other world at all. Just this one. My lonely burning world. I ripped at the empty space in front of me like a person tearing their way through a house in flames. I screamed her name, clearing a coiled path in the smoke with the vibrations of my voice. Not even the birds replied.

Enna blames herself for her sister's disappearance and finds herself unable to communicate with her family or to think beyond her basic survival needs. As she says on the first page: Grief and hunger leave no room for abstract thinking, let alone imagination. Yet as Enna's parents wallow in their own despair, Enna is forced to grow up as she takes on the responsibility of keeping her homestead going. As she becomes stronger and more capable, her creative thinking returns, and in the pages that follow, Enna leads us on a heart-pumping quest to save her family.

Enna’s coming of age story in Pluto Cove, gives us an authentic heroine: flawed, reflective, resourceful, and strong. We watch as she transitions from a sullen, awkward, self-obsessed teen to a self-sufficient young woman who understands the complexities of human relationships and forgives her own parents for their failings.

Lying there on the beach with Dad, Callie, and Benji, I realized my young age was an asset. For all I had left behind in Anchorage, it was a fraction of what Mom and Dad had abandoned. For as many dreams and goals and ambitions I had, most of them ended with soccer scores, test results, and school dances.  Mom and Dad had more than dreams or ambitions--they had an expectation, a confidence--that they would lead secure, contented lives and raise me and Callie in the same way. For me Pluto Cove was a change. For them it was a failure. I did not fault them. Or blame them. Or resent them. I just felt so, so sorry for them.

Arran Forbes's ability to bring the family dynamics to life, through her beautiful rendering of grief and resiliency, make this book more than a dystopian novel but a tribute to the bonds formed between relatives in the darkest of times. Despite the subject matter--climate change, racism, anxiety, social divides, survivalism--Pluto Cove is not a depressing book, but rather a lightening speed read and a story of love, hope, strength, adventure, and magic.

As I devoured Forbe's writing, I couldn't help but make comparisons to our current environmental and social conditions, for though the setting is more extreme, with worldwide drought and a mass extermination of immigrants, I found the story fully plausible and not so far from reality. While a fiction story, Forbes combines fantasy and realism to reflect upon modern times in a book that will delight adults and young adults alike.

I finished Pluto Cove a few minutes before landing in Anchorage, where we arrived to torrential rain. While my fellow passengers looked out the window and groaned, I found myself, after being so fully absorbed in this haunting, heroic story, wanting to leap up and cheer: "Its raining, it's raining, thank goodness for the life-giving rain!!!"

Comments

[Greta]

!!!

Thank you for sharing this review and for recommending our next read!