TITLE:  The City Where We Once Lived

AUTHOR:  Eric Barnes

PUBLICATION DATE:  2018

________________________

DESCRIPTION:

"In a near future where climate change has severely affected weather and agriculture, the North End of an unnamed city has long been abandoned in favor of the neighboring South End. Aside from the scavengers steadily stripping the empty city to its bones, only a few thousand people remain, content to live quietly among the crumbling metropolis. Many, like the narrator, are there to try to escape the demons of their past. He spends his time observing and recording the decay around him, attempting to bury memories of what he has lost.

But it eventually becomes clear that things are unraveling elsewhere as well, as strangers, violent and desperate alike, begin to appear in the North End, spreading word of social and political deterioration in the South End and beyond. Faced with a growing disruption to his isolated life, the narrator discovers within himself a surprising need to resist losing the home he has created in this empty place. He and the rest of the citizens of the North End must choose whether to face outsiders as invaders or welcome them as neighbors.

The City Where We Once Lived is a haunting novel of the near future that combines a prescient look at how climate change and industrial flight will shape our world with a deeply personal story of one man running from his past. With glowing prose, Eric Barnes brings into sharp focus questions of how we come to call a place home and what is our capacity for violence when that home becomes threatened."

___________________

REVIEW:

This novel starts of slowly and doesn't pick up pace.  The setting was developed very nicely, showing how depressing, bland and pointless - presumably the reflection of the live of the people in the North End, and the main character (narrator) in particular.  The prose is beautiful, but there is very little action in this novel and the plot is weak.  The narrator is a writer/reporter and we get to read about his observations of the North End and his personal issues.  These however, come across as irrelevant, even though they are the stuff of nightmares.  The author's concepts of how climate change, pollution and industrial flight affect a particular community is interesting, but it fades into the background.  I would have liked to have seen this idea explored a little more.  There IS light at the end of this dystopian novel.  The concept of the scavangers and how the people in the North End choose to live, as well as the gardener are all interesting ideas.  What the community chooses to do to survive, instead of devolving into chaos, is also rather different from the usual dystopian stories.  I just wish this book wasn't so bland and that the narrator had a bit more personality.

This was a very quick read. I found the reading level a little lower than I expected compared to some of the YA books I've read. It was partly because of the writing style with the short paragraphs, but also a lot of developments in the story felt simplified or shortened, making it seem a bit slice-of-life in a way. The main conflict of the story is how the 14-year-old Arnold Spirit a.k.a. Junior becomes a "part-time Indian" by going to an all-white school outside his tribe's reservation in a bid to better himself, but I felt I read less about his studies than about him being part of the school's basketball team.

Overall I liked the book, though. I don't really know much about Native American Indians, and their portrayal in what little I've come across in books, TV and movies often focuses more on their spiritual beliefs or myths/legends. So it was eye-opening to see from the inside what real life is like on a reservation. There's a lot of hopelessness in this book with all the poverty, alcoholism, violence and lack of education, but at the same time it also offers hope.

Accelerated Reader Level: 4.0

It was an okay book. I found it quite hard to relate to, but I was rooting for him throughout the entire book. It felt a bit fast paced at times though. 

I had heard so much about this book that I’ve really been looking forward to reading it. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t connect with it. I understand that it’s semi-autobiographical, so it must be an accurate portrayal of a 14-year-old boy’s thoughts and concerns. And teenage boys are a little bit gross. So maybe that’s why I was a bit put off by it – the MC’s relationships with and reactions to the female characters are definitely off-putting, no matter how realistic, and the humor, while perhaps accurate to the 14-year-old protagonist, is also juvenile. But the story itself is both funny and sad, that of a boy living on the “rez” and dealing with the fallout of asking to transfer to a town school where he will be the only non-white student. The book doesn’t pull punches in portraying alcoholism, violence, bullying, tribalism, and racism. It’s a lot to pack into a relatively short book. But the ending contains a redeeming message of hope, too, which helps to rescue a story that threatens to sink under the weight of these heavy themes.

Hardcover version. I read this book for The 16 Tasks of the Festive Season: Square 11: December 21^st-22^nd. Soyal (December 21st) is the winter solstice ceremony of the Zuni and the Hopi (Hopitu Shinumu), The Peaceful Ones, also known as the Hopi Indians. It is held on the shortest day of the year to ceremonially bring the sun back from its long winter slumber. Book themes for Soyal: Read a book set in the American Southwest / the Four Corners States (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah), –OR– a book that has a Native American protagonist. This book fits the square, as the main character is Native American.