Sherwood Nation

July 14, 2014
A catastrophic drought leaves Portland, Ore., suffering from daily power outages and water-rationing. The exhausted, hapless mayor and his ineffectual leadership bring no relief: the wealthy still get extra water shipments, and the poor still suffer the most. In response, former barista Renee and her activist friends stage a holdup of an illegal water truck. The action is caught on film by a TV crew, and Renee is instantly—and with no small whiff of sexism—dubbed “Maid Marian,” after “Robin Hood’s girlfriend.” She becomes first a symbol of rebellion and then a reluctant leader of the “nation of Sherwood,” formerly northeast Portland. Parzybok’s self-conscious reinvention of the Robin Hood legend is well-founded on contemporary environmental, social, and economic concerns, but the story would be better served if the idiosyncratic wit of Renee’s letters to her boyfriend, Zach, were on display in the rest of the book. A rambling plot, erratic pacing, and oversimplified characterizations undermine this fable of the clash between political idealism and harsh reality in a plausible near-future state of extremity.

August 1, 2014
In the midst of a slow apocalypse, a defiant young organizer takes up arms against her local government and empowers her community to take care of itself. This second novel by Parzybok (Couch, 2008) employs a thoughtful-and surprisingly realistic-approach to offering commentary on separatist movements. We open in a near-future Portland, Oregon, where a long drought has emptied the Columbia River and left the city cut off from America. Far from descending into a Mad Max frenzy of mutants and violence, the city continues much as it was, with bookstores and coffee shops and local politics holding sway over its citizens. But there's just not enough water to go around. It makes quite a stir when young barista Renee Gorski pulls off the brazen heist of a government water truck. Assuring her boyfriend, Zach, that things won't get out of hand, she adopts the moniker the press bestows upon her: Maid Marian. Together with her "Green Rangers," she carves out a block of neighborhoods with about 50,000 citizens and declares "Sherwood Nation" to be a sovereign state. The mechanics of the coup are interesting, and while there are some nods to Occupy and other protests against inequality-"A system that criminalizes a whistleblower is wanting in introspection," Renee tells a reporter-Parzybok takes a rational and well-measured approach to depicting a community uprising. While Renee makes progress, she's also forced to compromise quite often, as when she hires a local drug dealer as sheriff of their little country. If there's a villain, it's probably the conflicted, closeted gay mayor of Portland, Brandon Bartlett, but he's really a figurehead who would rather be playing video games. She's not so much fighting "The Man" as much as the system he represents. Keeping Portland weird with a well-written tale of an American insurgency.

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September 1, 2014
In the near future, a drought sweeps across the western U.S. The great rivers of the regionthe Columbia, the Deschutesdry up. Farms fail. There's mass migrationto the eastern states as the West falls into disarray. Then the eastern states put up borders to keep the westerners out. In Oregon, where this imaginative novel is set, water and power rationing are now the norm. When large, undocumented supplies of water are given to Portland's wealthy citizens, a young woman disgusted by the social imbalance, soon dubbed Maid Marian by the press, leads a group of activists, who find an unconventional way of redistributing the water to those who are in greater need. Parzybok is riffing on the Robin Hood story, to be sure, but he also layers on some astute social and political commentary, and he's built a fully functioning and believable future world. Give this one to fans of Adam Sternbergh's Shovel Ready (2014).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)