Book 2 Post 2

 

Synopsis

Road Out of Winter: An Apocalyptic Thriller by Alison Stine is a solutions journalism book that tells 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 Appalachian mountains to California to find her mother. Her mother and step-father had left a year earlier as the weather had begun to worsen, with the intention to return. In the year that the novel occurs, spring never sprung, life never bloomed, and chaos was set upon society. There were food and water shortages, schools and businesses closed because they couldn’t afford to heat the buildings, and people began to leave Wylodine’s Appalachian town to search for better. Soon, there was a full collapse of government, the fall of radio and internet, and near anarchy. Wylodine travels with a misfit band of “orphans”: Grayson, whose parents left with the cult-like church, Dance, whose parents weren’t around much anyway, Jamie, a 15-year old mother living in a skate park, and Jamie’s daughter. However, Road Out of Winter isn’t a heartwarming story about finding family in places you thought you wouldn’t. It’s a solemn form of speculative realism that shows what could happen to our society with current climate trends. Wylodine and her group learn not to trust anyone as they encounter several groups coping with the environmental disaster in their own ways. They find that desperate people are an even greater threat to them than the cold. Road Out of Winter is a story about the extremes that people will go to to ensure their survival and protect what they care about.

Takeaways

I thought Road Out of Winter did well in creating interesting and realistic main characters for the story to follow. The group has a certain distrust but careful optimism that the reader can share. This allows the reader to understand the decisions and feelings, said or implied, that the characters act with. In terms of the setting, I thought it was intriguing how quickly it seemed like the world transitioned from normal society to “apocalyptic thriller”. Given that the story is climate fiction, I expected a more gradual transition, but it seemed like it was a more sudden development. Society was uselessly underprepared for the events in the book and collapsed entirely through just the fall. It seems unlikely that the government and authorities wouldn’t try to maintain order for longer but applying some suspension of disbelief, it did help the book in some ways. First, it allowed us to see the drastic actions that people take in these situations. It amplified how drastic their behavior felt given the change from normal society at the beginning of the book. Second, the developments could be told in a more narrative first-hand way. They weren’t recounted but instead told in real time through the book, adding the “thrill” part in “apocalyptic thriller”. I did like the climate fiction genre and thought the book was a thought-provoking addition to the genre’s ideas about climate change. Overall, I thought Road Out of Winter was easy to read, well written, well paced, and offered some interesting conversation about environmental disaster from climate change.

Impressions

Still, I felt that Road Out of Winter was a bit anticlimactic and lacked substance. Just because a story doesn’t need its characters to share good moments with each other or develop meaningful relationships, it doesn’t mean that it's not narratively effective. A lot of reviews describe Road Out of Winter as a story of found family but I don’t really agree. Wylodine and company just travel together; they barely get to know each other and I don’t think they really even like each other. In fact, they really only stick together on the basis that they’re not necessarily bad people and everyone else in the world is apparently. This was another issue I thought the book had. All of the people introduced in the book are really extreme – what happened to all of the normal people? In Wylodine’s hometown she interacts with drug addicts and creeps, a guy named “the Pumpkin King”, and members of a church cult. After they begin traveling, they encounter Skate State, an awful totalitarian group led by murderers and rapists, a group of environmentalists that live in the trees and fight Skate State, a guy in a Taco Bell with a wolf mask, and… the church cult again? Not to mention the weird brief scene where a group of suicidal people in white dress try to make Wylodine sacrifice herself with them. My point is that the most normal people she meets throughout the entire book are a fourteen year old mother, a hippy named Dance the Dirt Boy, and Grayson whose personality is just having a broken foot. And she brings them all with her. Society only collapsed like a month or two ago. Anyway, in the end, they honestly probably only traveled like 100 miles, Dance and Grayson left, and now Wylodine thinks she can get two children across the country because she’s good at growing weed or something. I guess it’s a somewhat realistic ending to the situation but it felt like there was a lot of build-up for nothing to happen. I didn’t think Road Out of Winter was bad – it was written well and interesting enough to read through easily – but it just felt like there wasn’t a lot to take away from the actual story.