Harrow

"In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after the environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. Once nature as we know it is dead, the pursuit of happiness fades into insignificance, food is scarce, and even time doesn't progress in an organized fashion. Harrow follows the picaresque journey of Khristen--a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she washes up at a "resort" on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call "Big Girl." In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this "baggy seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth"? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, delivered with Williams's searing, deadpan wit, their intertwined tale of paradise lost serves to commit us anew to that paradise, and to their reasons--against all reasonableness--to try and recover something of it"--