Piano Tide

Starred review from December 1, 2016
This is award-winning naturalist, philosopher, and climate activist Moore's first foray into fiction, and it is not only a remarkably thoughtful and compelling look at the threats to endangered species and the willful destruction of the environment but also a thoroughly engaging tale featuring vividly drawn characters who grab our interest from the very first pages. For Moore, the most basic question is who is responsible for protecting our Earth? And each of her unique characters living in the tiny harbor town of Good River, Alaska, answers this question in life-changing ways. Entrepreneur Axel intends to capitalize undeveloped resources. His wife, Rebecca, is a flower child who asks herself in what morally corrosive world would people build a dam that cut salmon off from the river. Kenny is a Vietnam vet and the town's moral compass, routinely quoting Greek philosophers and Dostoevsky at the coffee shop. Nora, the newest arrival, brought her grand piano with her as she escaped her activist past, and Tick is the good guy, caught, in the novel's inevitable denouement, between greed and the environment. Moore writes so eloquently and with such passion about the natural world, from tiny tide-pool inhabitants to giant grizzlies and towering hemlocks, that she leaves the reader in wonder and awe.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)