Book 2 Post 1

The Reason I Chose To Read This Book

I selected to read from the solutions journalism books Road Out of Winter: An Apocalyptic Thriller by Alison Stine. Road Out of Winter details the story of Wylodine, who lives in an apocalyptic frozen world that has been impacted by climate change. Wylodine is a young marijuana farmer who decides to travel through the mountains to California to find her mother. I thought from YesMagazine’s list of “11 Books to Give and Share'' that this one sounded the most exciting. I have always liked to read post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels in the past so I thought that Road Out of Winter aligned with the type of content that I like. I also thought it would be a good read after our experiences writing the AMDP Proposal because my company of interest is extremely concerned with climate change and reducing carbon dioxide pollution in order to prevent a scenario like the one that Road Out of Winter is set in. I think the idea of a “cli-fi” sub-genre of literature is compelling and definitely prevalent given current events and understanding of impending climate change. Road Out of Winter is speculative realism which allows it to explore subjects that are both within our reality and outside of our reality, but within plausibility. This allows it to be unique and thought-provoking. In middle school I read The Maze Runner trilogy which is also a type of “cli-fi” and they were some of my favorite books so I am hoping to enjoy this novel in the same way. Some of my classmates that had already picked and started reading their books described Road Out of Winter as “weird” – not bad, just “weird”. If a book isn’t bad, just different, then I think there’s still a lot to takeaway from it, so I was interested in reading it. The concept sounds intriguing and easier to consume narratively than some of the other topics on the list: political and racial conversations.

First Impressions

The beginning of Road Out of Winter: An Apocalyptic Thriller mostly begins by introducing the setting and the circumstances that the characters will be dealing with rather than the characters. I had expected based off of the YesMagazine article and the brief description of the novel I had read online that it would take place in the midst of a full-blown apocalypse – the “complete final destruction of the world”. However, the beginning of the book is at the beginning of the drastic climate change. It is the first summer where the flowers never bloomed in the spring. My favorite part so far was when the main character is recognizing things that didn’t happen because of the climate change. She mentions that people had stopped saying “what a crazy year” because it was too serious by mid-summer. The author uses very descriptive language that makes you feel sympathy for Wylodine as she realizes things she took for granted never returned: the flowers never bloomed, the woodpeckers stopped thudding their beaks against her house, the owls stopped whooping, frogs and ducks stopped skimming the water. She describes her dependency on the warmth and the sun. In a way, she relates the climate change to the transition in her life from childhood, a peaceful time, to now, a time of uncertainty and fear. I was surprised that the climate change’s effects happened so suddenly in the book. Before that summer, everyone was engaging in their lives as normal, but I guess that’s the nature of an apocalypse. The first chapter closes with Lisbeth, Wylodine’s friend, asking her to migrate with her church south to escape the cold. She says that the church can protect her from the cause of the climate change: God. I thought this was a good ending to the first chapter because it shows how drastically people were beginning to react, the severity of the situation, and that people were dealing with it in different ways.