Swarm
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
In a not-so-far-off future of diminished energy reserves and collapsing economies, thirty-seven-year-old Sandy Burch-Bailey lives a difficult existence. She survives by fishing, farming, and beekeeping in a small island community with her partner, Marvin, and their elderly and ill friend, Thompson. As they wait for an overdue supply ship to arrive with medicine for Thompson, vegetables go missing from their garden. A footprint in the soil leads Sandy to believe the thief is a homeless youngster. Childless and aching to be a mother, Sandy narrates her story to the child, reliving her life in a city plagued by power outages, unemployment, and violent protests. When the girl’s life is threatened, Sandy and Marvin must come together to protect both the child and their fragile community.
Told in two storylines divided by geography and time, Swarm is a suspenseful and powerful debut novel about survival and coming to terms with life’s regrettable choices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carter makes the leap from poetry and nonfiction to full-length fiction in this quiet tale of life, death, and rebirth, set against a near-future backdrop of economic collapse and increasing hardship. Cassandra ekes out a meager existence on an island along with her lover, Marvin, and their ailing friend, Thomson. Of late, she's obsessed with feeding and taming a feral girl haunting the nearby area. Cassandra's experiences before arriving on the island are slowly revealed through a series of flashbacks, including her dalliances with both community service and violent activism, as civilization crumbles around her. The quiet desperation and bleakness of the story line is balanced by faint optimism, personified through an ongoing focus on beehives in both past and present. The language is beautiful and emotional, fitting for a book where the action is understated and the focus is on introspection and day-to-day survival, but there's little to connect the reader with the characters.
