I was fascinated the whole time but I didn't think I was invested until I reached the end and just started crying like a baby. I guess I was invested the whole time.

For Earth Day, I was out along the shore, picking up plastic. Big huge pieces, small shredded pieces. Plastic bottles. Straws. Food wrappers. Trashlands came to mind. Plastic production has been outlawed, and pluckers mine the rivers for old plastic to recycle into construction bricks. It's a plausible world, and one I cannot forget thanks to Alison Stine's odd yet compelling story. Recommended.

I recently read Stine's first novel, the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award winner [b:Road Out of Winter|49374466|Road Out of Winter|Alison Stine|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1587322029l/49374466._SX50_.jpg|66298111], and really liked it. I liked Trashlands slightly less, but still found it to be an immersive read.

The book is set in the near future world ravaged by climate change, in an area of extreme poverty. Scavenging for plastic forms the basis of the survival-driven economy of the poor. But even while people spend most of their energy just trying to survive, they also try to find ways to live - through art, relationships, and sharing with others their memories and their stories.

The book is not plot driven, but instead features a more experiential slice of life. The characters, their feelings and experiences, hopes and fears, their interactions with each other and their surrounding environment, are the real feature here. The picture being painted is of a difficult life of poverty (always universally and exponentially worse for women and children), the daily struggle to survive, and the little things that make life "a life." There is no real beginning and no real end, just a segment of time where the reader gets to drop into the lives of the characters.

Alison Stine is a poet whose writing is suffused with imagery and emotion, but also at times somewhat fluid with respect to anchoring events in time. It all does come together, the events accreting in an organic fashion, unfolding in the mind of the reader to form a layered whole. This is a book to experience and to soak in, to think about about the people in it and their efforts to live and to persist despite the difficult world they live in.

It's not a book for everyone, I don't think, but it was good for me.

People had thought there would be no more time, but there was. Just different time. Time moving slower. Time after disaster, when they still had to live.

. . .
But once you left a place, it was hard to come back. Mr. Fall knew that. You forgot the way. Or the way was blocked by debris, floods that washed away the path, fire that cut a new path. You ran out of money, plastic, food. You were needed in a new place. You needed other places, other people, more.

. . .
Letting go—that was how you lived. Holding on too hard, too long, could end you, sure as an animal stuck in mud.

LOVED

Don't go into this expecting high action (like I did) because it's not there. It's a slow burn story of a mother trying to survive in a near-future dystopia and dreaming of getting her son back. Stine does an amazing job at world building and development I'd this society where plastic is currency and the conveniences we enjoy now don't exist. It's written beautifully once you get that it's a picture of their life, not an adventure story.

I was hoping for more, it became as monotonous as the music at the strip club, and so much unresolved at the end.