Saltcrop
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of The Stardust Grail comes the epic tale of two sisters who sail across oceans to find their missing third sister—and Earth’s environmental salvation.
In Earth's not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.
But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find—and save—her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister's work and the corporations that want what she discovered.
But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister—or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This near-future dystopia set in a world broken by climate change, ecological damage, and corporate greed focuses on what strains and strengthens the bonds among three sisters. The eldest, Nora, who’s ambitious and determined, has disappeared from her city job at Renewal, the agricultural company that manufactures the chemical used to treat the constantly mutating blight that’s killed so many of the world’s crops. Carmen, the extroverted middle sister, and Skipper, the shy, prickly youngest, sail off to find her. Nora vanished while looking for another source for blight-resistant crops—and while in debt to EarthWorks, Renewal’s competitor. Is Nora dead? Is she in trouble? Or does she simply not want to be found? The stakes are real, and so are these sisters’ bonds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kitasei (The Stardust Grail) demonstrates her range in this moving portrayal of sibling dynamics set in a disturbing near future. A devastating blight has decimated humanity's food supplies. In its wake, Skipper supports herself and her ailing grandmother by selling the plastic, metal, and glass waste she scavenges from a large offshore garbage patch. She becomes increasingly concerned about the whereabouts of her oldest sister, Nora, who got a job working for the massive agricultural company Renewal as a product tester and has been visiting less and less frequently. After hearing nothing from her for several months, Skipper gets a letter from one of Nora's colleagues informing her that Nora has not been seen for a while, and asking if she returned home. Skipper persuades her other sister, Carmen, a nurse, to sail with her across the largely flooded world in search of Nora. The stakes increase when the sisters learn that Nora was embroiled in corporate intrigue involving Renewal's high-security vault containing seeds "built to endure the end of civilization." Meanwhile, the close proximity of the voyage brings long dormant tensions between Skipper and Carmen to a head. Kitasei pays as much attention to her protagonist's nuanced inner life as to the page-turning apocalyptic plotline, creating a tale that feels both intimate and expansive. It's an impressive feat.
