Road Out of Winter

Starred review from July 1, 2020

Stine (The Protectors) blends a rural thriller and speculative realism into what could be called dystopian noir. The author's vision is profoundly moving, as distressing as Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone but liable to inspire real-world action. Wil, who sells her parents' basement-grown weed with her power to make anything grow, while at the Crossroads gas station, yearns in their two-year absence to leave southeast Ohio's Appalachia and join them in California. The ever-cold and early dark signs of devastating climate change are freakish enough, but people lining up for bottled water, and hunting the woods for meat, has become the new normal. After encountering, and reluctantly taking in, woods-wandering Grayson, who has twisted his ankle, Wil hitches up her trailer home and trucks off. Her instincts to cover, hide, and keep secrets resonates with the broader environment of chaotic Internet identities and pervasive surveillance. Paranoia is dominant. Wil's chronic emotional state, fortunately, is self-control in a desolate journey peopled by violent cults, drifters, and elitist deviants confronted by a natural world most have lost the ability to comprehend, let alone survive. VERDICT Readers searching for a novel fueled by fierce intelligence and empathy will find here a celebration of humanity, and a warning against its loss.--William Grabowski, McMechen, WV

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2020
Twentysomething Wylodine has led a tough life of poverty and neglect in Appalachian Ohio. Her only friend, Lisbeth, is a member of the Church, an organization that Wil views more as a cult. Wil lives in a trailer on a farm that belongs to her mother's boyfriend, Lobo, a grower and supplier of marijuana. After a late spring and snow in September, Wil's mother and Lobo venture forth to California in search of better weather. When spring doesn't arrive at all the next year and the world keeps becoming colder, more people, including Lisbeth and members of the Church, leave for warmer weather. Wil is determined to stay, until she receives a postcard from her mother asking her to come to California. As Wil treks to California in her trailer, she picks up fellow travelers along the way. With echoes of The Road and Winter's Bone, Stine's latest is an excellent feminist dystopian novel of survival, desperation and, ultimately, hope. Like the seeds Wil cultivates, beauty emerges from the hard shell of the narrative of despondency and cruelty. Sublimely written and with much for book clubs to discuss, this book is highly recommended for all collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

May 25, 2020
Society collapses after two consecutive years of winter in this haunting dystopia from Stine (The Protectors). When Wil’s family leaves Appalachian Ohio for California, 20-something Wil is left behind to tend the family business of illegally growing and selling marijuana. But as the town’s residents realize there will be no spring this year once again, Wil receives a postcard from her mother with her new address. She sets out to meet her mother, accompanied by two young men she rescues, one who was lost in the woods and one who was caught in a mob of angry townsfolk. On their cross-country journey in a truck they encounter helpful environmentalists; a dangerous, totalitarian community that’s sprung up in a skate park; and a suicide cult. Wil’s farming skills and collection of vegetable seeds and grow lights may be her only chance of survival, but they also make her a target for those willing to kill for her resources. Stine’s prose is crisp and atmospheric (“The earth was so frozen it was like chipping at bone.... Snow quickly filled the holes I had made, as if even this small blackness was not allowed to stay in the new white world”), and though bleakness abounds, the ending strikes a lovely balance of hope and pathos. Fans of climate fiction and found family stories will be entranced. Agent: Eric Smith, P.S. Literary.