This book was bizarre (in a good way). It was my first Cat Valente book, and it certainly has me curious to read more of her stuff. I’d call it almost, but not quite, a New Weird dystopia. Throw in a completely nonlinear approach to telling the story, along with some episodes where the narrator tells you what she would have liked to have happened (but doesn’t specify that until afterwards), and the whole thing left my head spinning in a manner reminiscent of Catch-22.
It’s set in the future, when the Earth has warmed and the seas have risen to the point where the entire surface has been covered with water. Our protagonist is Tetley (named after the tea), a resident of Garbagetown. Garbagetown is a floating island made of literal trash, where people survive on the remnants of the civilization that wrecked the planet. Tetley is an optimist, a very happy person (she insists) and life in Garbagetown is just amazing even if no one appreciates it like her, especially all her neighbors who regularly beat her and whom she then has to thank for their instruction.
This book is chock full of social commentary on consumer culture, broadly defined. I certainly felt keenly aware that I was reading the book on my Kindle, or sometimes my phone if it was more convenient, in a comfortably air conditioned house. The literal trash of our society is enough to sustain Garbagetown for generations. And yet the citizens of Garbagetown have learned very little. They dream of a future where dry land will emerge, and where they can all have plenty of food and air conditioning and gerbils and medicine and cars and jacuzzis (most of them aren’t sure what a jacuzzi is, but it sure sounds nice). As Valente said in the afterward, “The oceans can erase our cities, but they cannot drown our existential malaise. That shit’s waterproof.”
The cover quotes Ken Liu as calling this book “The Candide of our #@$*%?! age,” and I think that’s a better comparison than anything I can come up with.