Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. Following a short review, please feel free to discuss the book in the comments!
The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016)
Written by: Jenni Fagan
Genre: Dystopian science fiction
Length: 272 pages (Kindle)
Publisher: Hogarth
Why I nominated this for book club: I was looking for books about winter and this was advertised in that fashion.
The premise:
It’s November of 2020, and the world is freezing over. Each day colder than the last.
There’s snow in Israel, the Thames is overflowing, and an iceberg separated from the Fjords in Norway is expected to drift just off the coast of Scotland. As ice water melts into the Atlantic, frenzied London residents evacuate by the thousands for warmer temperatures down south. But not Dylan. Grieving and ready to build life anew, he heads north to bury his mother’s and grandmother’s ashes on the Scottish islands where they once lived.
Hundreds of miles away, twelve-year-old Estella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by in the snowy, mountainous Highlands, preparing for a record-breaking winter. Living out of a caravan, they spend their days digging through landfills, searching for anything with restorative and trading value. When Dylan arrives in their caravan park in the middle of the night, life changes course for Estella and Constance. Though the weather worsens, his presence brings a new light to daily life, and when the ultimate disaster finally strikes, they’ll all be ready.
Written in incandescent, dazzling prose, The Sunlight Pilgrims is a visionary story of courage and resilience in the midst of nature’s most violent hour; by turns an homage to the portentous beauty of our natural world, and to just how strong we can be, if the will and the hope is there, to survive its worst.
This book will obviously be spoiled.
Discussion: Full disclosure, right off the bat: I wasn’t wild about this one. From the get go, I found the styling Fagan used for dialogue to just be the most annoying thing to read. And I’ve seen other books by her; there’s a sample of her next book in the end of this one and I know it’s not a thing she does in every book. If anyone has any insights into the possible purpose of not using traditional styling for the dialogue, I’d love to hear it, because it didn’t add anything to the store for me.
To sandwich some positive in here, I did like the characters. Stella in particular was a standout. I went into this book expecting it to be more about the winter apocalypse, but it was more a story about the people weathering this winter apocalypse. Stella, a girl still discovering what it means to be a girl trapped in a body she doesn’t feel comfortable in, navigating a crush that turns out to be disastrous, seeking companionship and advice on the internet. Dylan was slightly less interesting, but I did like hearing about his relationship with his mother and his grandmother, and the scene where Stella accidentally dumps Vivienne into the front yard was pretty heartbreaking.
The discussion guide at the end of my copy of the book says that the ending was left intentionally ambiguous, but I wonder how just how ambiguous four people trapped in a house piled under snow with maybe a months worth of food and wood, no electricity, and no sign of the world thawing really is. To me? It sounds like a recipe for four frozen meatcicles, but I am notoriously pessimistic when it comes to books.
Also, endings are really important to me. I want the book to have felt like it followed a road map by the time I get to the end, I want that road map to have made sense. With few exceptions that I can’t think of here, I just don’t love the ambiguous ending, and this one was not an exception. I don’t even need them to be happy. If they’d all frozen to death as they fell asleep I honestly would have been alright with that.
Fagan utilized a sparseness of prose in the novel, which added to the atmosphere. I think that can be done and still use quotations around dialogue, but maybe that just wasn’t Fagan’s vision for the novel.
In conclusion: They can’t all be winners, and this one just didn’t do it for me. Did y’all like it?
According to my kindle, I am 52% of the way through this book. It’s been slow going for me. I enjoy some things about it, but your review does make me want to not finish it now. Like you, I am not a huge fan of ambiguous endings.
Yeeeeeeeeeah it just wasn’t the best. If you’re already not sure about it 52% of the way through, I’d say just give it a miss. There are better things to read out there.
I liked this book well enough, although I didn’t love it. I did notice the odd dialogue tagging at the beginning, but eventually it faded into the background, so it didn’t distract from the story for me. And although I’m a pessimist in life, evidently I’m an optimist when it comes to fiction, because my brain resolved the ambiguous ending by concluding that they will all survive and the winter will end more or less on schedule.
I did find the winter thing distracting throughout, since it’s the opposite of what is likely to come from climate changes in the long run. I wasn’t quite able to suspend disbelief and let it go.
Like you, I enjoyed the characters. I found Dylan and Stella’s friendship really touching. At first I was worried that he would have a less than ideal reaction to her being trans, so I was really pleased that he was unfazed and then became her defender against her dad (although of course he had his own motives there for squelching Alistair). I liked the sense of camaraderie in the face of the cold, both metaphorical and literal – which may be another reason that I read the ending of the book optimistically.
See I haven’t read enough into exactly what will happen when all the polar ice caps melt so I could happily suspend disbelief on the science side of things, but I can’t forgive what amounts to a bad ending for me.
I was REALLY happy that Dylan was so unfazed by Stella’s transition, because having to deal with her classmates being dicks was just about enough for me. I really liked the way her mother handled things, going from “but my chiiiiiild” to her staunchest defender pretty rapidly. It was such a nice thing to see in fiction.
Yeah, the situation with Stella’s classmates was grim. That was one place where the ending did seem genuinely ambiguous to me. Assuming the winter ends, and they’re able to start going to school again, will they make amends and treat her better, and will she be able to forgive them and safely reintegrate into her school community?
I was intrigued by ghost grandma’s promise that Stella will meet her internet friend later on, and all will be well. But it seems like possibly a pretty lonely life for Stella in the interim, if all of her friends are adults (and those adults are mainly just her mom and her mom’s romantic partners).