Bingo Square: Family (four of the five characters are from the same family)
The setting of this novel is the best part – set on a fictional island, Shearwater, near Antarctica, it follows a family of four (father, Dominic, and three children) as they prepare to leave Shearwater forever after eight years as caretakers. Shearwater is home to one of the largest seed banks in the world, a large seal population, and once housed a thriving science community. But climate change is coming for even this far-away island, and what was supposed to be a way to save and restart humanity. In only six weeks, the last ship is coming to take the remaining human populace of the island and relocate the seeds that have made the cut to be stored elsewhere, only a fraction of the ones kept there.
This is a world deeply impacted by climate change – the erosion of the island and the loss of land, floods and wildfires all playing prominent roles in the lives of characters. While the novel could very much be set in today, something about the characters’ attitudes towards climate change and its impact on their lives made me feel like it was slightly in the future, 10-20 years into the future, though everything mentioned is absolutely happening now. It just seemed accelerated – or maybe it’s simply that the characters are people that actually pay attention to this and care while it feels like the general population still isn’t thinking about climate change in these terms.
But … the moodiness, the setting and the thoughts on climate change and survival were all things I enjoyed as well as the family dynamics. The part where the novel lost me is that the author didn’t simply rely on all those topics to be a strong enough story on their own and instead added a mystery element to it with a newcomer on the island trying to discover what the family is hiding from her since someone broke the radios and something about the way they describe the departure of the last four scientists seems off. It’s not even that adding the additional character, Rowan, to the mix bothered me. She shook up their world in interesting ways (though she definitely seemed to not consider her actions or remarks and their impact initially); the issue was so much of the story relied on tension from a secret that honestly didn’t seem that important compared to everything else going on (and the resolution of the mystery also didn’t really change my mind about it, and bordered on almost comical).