The Light Pirate

TL;DR: If you loved Station Eleven, I think you'll love The Light Pirate. And that's just about the highest praise I can give.

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Any time a publisher tries to compare a book to Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, arguably my favorite novel of all time, I'm going to be skeptical. Lucky for me (and readers everywhere), on rare occasion my natural cynicism proves not just unwarranted but spectacularly, joyfully, scream-it-from-the-rooftops wrong. That was the case here. The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton is magnificent.

Fair warning: it is also devastating, on many levels, at many moments. You get attached, and then in an instant - gone. That said, just like in Station Eleven, “post-apocalypic joy” does exist, and it's especially stunning for being heartbreakingly hard-won. (Here, though, it's post-climate destruction, not a global pandemic.)

The writing is beautiful and almost painfully vivid. So many passages struck me, I wound up with pages upon pages of highlights. I won't quote anything in full yet as I know it's an uncorrected proof, but I will say that Lily Brooks-Dalton's metaphors are exquisite.

Speculative fiction is one of my favorite genres. This is one of the most stunning examples of it I've read since, well, Station Eleven. It reminds me of an excerpt of a Dobyns poem I love: “This is where we are in history - to think / the table will remain full; to think the forest will / remain where we have pushed it; to think our bubble of / good fortune will save us from the night”. This is one of those books that I wish everyone would read, not only because it's exceptional (which it is) but because it's critical. To paraphrase Brooks-Dalton, we all know that what we're doing to our world isn't sustainable - but we've hung our hats on the question of proximity, betting that we'll squeak through a closing drawbridge, that the worst won't come until we're gone. The Light Pirate - out later this year - calls our bluff.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.