Looking For a Good Book

Humanity is on the verge of losing the battle against the climate crisis and the world’s wealthiest are using the working class to focus on protecting their wealth, rather than addressing the problems. When the planet reached Point 0, a great number of working class people banded together to do everything they could to reverse the course, taking back control from the uber wealthy. Among those people were Emi’s parents – her father a hero in the fight against the raging forest fires, and her mother, separated from her parents as child in the immigrant camps, emerged as a hero as well as still fights for better politicians and for those who let the earth nearly collapse to pay for their crimes.

Emi Vargas is learning about the Great Transition, as it has come to be called, in school and is writing a paper for class. It is here that Emi begins to learn what a part her parents played in the Great Transition, and she interviews her family to get the inside story.

When a Great Transition celebration turns violent and Emi’s mother is framed for murder and disappears, Emi and her father search for her.

I don’t remember exactly what is was that made me want to read this book – likely it was the environmental crisis that serves as the catalyst for the story – but I’m really glad I did.

Author Nick Fuller Googins grabs the reader’s attention right from the start and holds tightly to it all the way to the end.

This is one of those odd science fiction novels that doesn’t feel at all like a science fiction novel. It feels almost more like an Anne Tyler novel – a tight story about ordinary people … except, well, these people happened to save the world and humanity was nearly wiped out.

I don’t usually go in for gimmicky storytelling – where the author has a clever device to dump a bunch of information on the reader without the characters repeating information the other characters would already know – but I actually quite liked (looked forward to!) the draft pages of Emi’s report that would include the teacher’s notes about something to consider or possibly change in a final draft. These didn’t strike me as info dump passages at the time.

The characters ring true and even though Emi’s parents played major roles in the Great Transition, they never seem bigger than life. They are simply Emi’s parents who had a life before she was born.

I really like how this book kind of snuck up on me. It was just another book in my to-be-read queue on my Kindle but it quickly took shape and became a looked-forward-to read.

Looking for a good book? Nick Fuller Googins’ The Great Transition is a strong, political/environmental science fiction novel that will likely be discussed along with books such as Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Richard Mattheson’s I Am Legend, and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Great Transition

author: Nick Fuller Googins

publisher: Atria Books

ISBN: 9781668010754

hardcover, 352 pages