Total Oblivion, More or Less

October 19, 2009
As this peculiar but entertaining first novel begins, geography and cosmology have shifted. Natural laws work unpredictably. The U.S. government has disappeared and plundering bands of Goths and Scythians roam the Midwest. Sea serpents close the shipping lanes, and oil companies convert their tankers into slave ships that cruise the Mississippi. Clear-eyed, tough-minded teen Macy Palmer flees St. Paul with her family for the illusory safety of an island in the Gulf of Mexico. As they travel through a wavering postapocalyptic landscape, her relatives undergo upsetting personal metamorphoses. DeNiro has attracted attention for his short fiction (especially the Small Beer Press collection Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead
), and this longer story's energy ebbs a bit as Macy gets some of the oddness under control. Nonetheless, it's an impressive debut from a promising writer.

October 15, 2009
After Minnesota is overrun by ancient Scythians and a wasp-borne plague, 16-year-old Macy and her family embark on adventures of ever-escalating weirdness as they make their way down the Mississippi toward safety that no longer exists.

DeNiro (stories: Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, 2006) opens his debut novel in semi-comic register, as the family struggles to adjust to a weird new order involving soldier-looters in Lakers jerseys, the shuttering of all non–fast-food businesses, SUV chassis towed by mules and a scar-faced guard at the family's riverside internment camp who sends Macy a looted necklace via her younger brother Ciaran."I had a disfigured stalker with a sword," she wisecracks."This made going stag to junior prom look like a joke." The mood grows steadily darker and grimmer. First Ciaran gets involved in intrigues among factions of the anachronistic warriors who have overrun the entire country and are battling for turf from coast to coast. The family manages to escape on a boat that limps south toward St. Louis, where Macy's father, an astronomer, keeps insisting that a university job awaits him. Along the way both Macy and her mother are stricken with the plague; Macy's sister runs off and is sold into indenture; they encounter elephants and giraffes, a wooden submarine and a talking dog. Eventually Ciaran is captured and sent south to Nueva Roma for trial and execution. Their father, now thriving in the former St. Louis as an astrologer, dispatches the recovered Macy to the grand delta capital to see if anything can be done to help her brother.

A fast-paced, suspenseful dystopian picaresque, part Huck Finn and part bizarro-world Swiss Family Robinson, with the latter winning out—to the benefit of those reading for plot and perhaps the disappointment of those looking for literary ambition.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 15, 2009
This debut novel by a finalist for the Crawford Award and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award ("Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead") is an apocalyptic coming-of-age tale about Macy, a teenager from St. Paulor what used to be St. Paul. Scythians have invaded, and no one seems to know where they came from. There's a deadly plague going around, civilization has fallen into ruin, and Macy's family is falling apart. Luckily, the enigmatic Em, a submarine captain, and her unlikely partner, Wye, help Macy find her way in this strange new world. VERDICT Sensitive readers may be offended by the language and drug use depicted, while others might be distracted by the narrative, which switches perspectives. Still, the disjointed quality adds to the book's sense of chaos and turmoil. Those who like doomsday/survival stories will be at home here.Jennifer Anderson, Texas A&M Univ.-Corpus Christi Lib.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2009
For 16-year-old Macy, the whole world has gone crazy, quite literally. Barbarians from antiquity have invaded America, while bizarre plagues and impossibly shifting landscapes ravage her Minnesota homeland. Together with her parents, sister, brother, and a possibly evil dog, Macy sets out down the Mississippi on an adventure that takes her into the smoldering ruins of St. Louis, aboard a wooden submarine thats bigger on the inside than outside, and finally into the stone-skyscraper capital of Nueva Roma. All the while she dodges oil-men turned slavers, plague-instigating wasps, an albino bounty hunter, and, perhaps most dangerous of all, her scheming younger brother. DeNiro (who flaunted a knack for offhand sf oddness in Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, 2006) makes sure never to do anything as dull as explaining what the heck is going onwe simply accept that the world has become a surreal, historical landscape come to life and move on. He drops in so many tantalizingly inspired touchesthe new (old?) empire considers Post-it notes a precious natural resourcethat leaving his inside-out America at the end is almost painful. There arent many writers who take weirdness as seriously as DeNiro does, and fewer still who can extract so much grounded emotion, gut-dropping humor, and rousing adventure from it. A dizzying display of often brilliant, always strange, and definitely unique storytelling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)