California

by Edan Lepucki

The highly acclaimed, instant New York Times bestseller that '[gives] expression to a generational anxiety about the near future, one rooted in the threat of environmental crisis...The experience of reading California brings validation to anyone who sits upright in the middle of the night struck with the instability of the human project on this planet: others are awake, too' Guardian

The sunshine state lies in darkness.

Los Angeles is in ruins, left to the angels now.

And the world Cal and Frida have always known is gone.

Cal and Frida have left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable despite the isolation and hardships they face. Consumed by fear of the future and mourning for a past they can't reclaim, they seek comfort and solace in one other. But the tentative existence they've built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she's pregnant.

Terrified of the unknown but unsure of their ability to raise a child alone, Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them security, but Cal and Frida soon realise this community poses its own dangers. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to trust.

A gripping and provocative debut novel by a stunning new talent,California imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in which clashes between mankind's dark nature and irrepressible resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the ones we love.

• ISBN10: 0349139474
• ISBN13: 9780349139470
• Publish Date: 16 April 2015 (first published 1 January 2014)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Imprint: Abacus
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 400
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Interesting premise; less-than-interesting execution. Felt like it was a rock skipping the surface and not a boulder plunging underneath. It was very California— I feel in the south, the midwest, the Rust Belt, anything, you’d get so much more out of the politics of a cult in the wake of an apocalypse. At least more interesting surprises.

First half, I enjoyed the day-to-day survival of two people not necessarily primed for survival, in a much more settled setting than The Road. It really would be about carving out a home, getting food planted in the ground, and Lepucki makes it interesting. It’s not watching paint dry.

I also enjoyed the slow burn of the “apocalypse.” It’s not a bang or a whimper. It’s a recognizable world that takes years to go dark, passing many of the same signposts we’re passing today.

The last half goes too M. Night Shyamalan for me with the Spikes and the Pirates and the Vote and the Land. Not even twists are surprising if the people aren’t. Give me one surprising person over ten surprising plots, please.

Obviously I don’t know Lepucki, so this may be unfounded, but I feel like if you got out of LA or NYC you’d write a different story. It thinks it’s going wild when it’s really playing safe, and that’s a big dealbreaker for me.

In sum: good enough, but not better than good. Three stars for the first half, one for the latter, and four for the book jacket, which is beautiful.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Cal and Frida is living in the middle of the 21st century, however it wasn’t the future we expected. Cities have crumbled, the internet has died and technology is worthless. Leaving city life behind, they now have to live in the wilderness, struggling to survive. Isolation and hardship are all new experiences; they live in fear of an uncertain future. A future that now consists of giving birth and raising a child in this post-apocalyptic world.

The post-apocalyptic back drop has been hugely popular lately and it isn’t just young adult fiction. Many literary fiction authors have tried their hand at the genre, giving them a unique world to explore real life issues. I’m thinking of great books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, The Passage by Justin Cronin and the Maddaddam series by Margaret Atwood. Edan Lepucki’s California sets out to join the ranks of the great with this overly ambitious first novel.

I will be honest, the only reason I picked up California was because of the promotion that appeared on The Colbert Report a while ago. The novel had enough to peak my interest but I had great difficulty getting a copy where I lived. Ironically I finally settled on getting the book through Audible to listen to. The premise of the novel was great; the idea of a world returning to the dark ages offered some interesting ideas. While we are never sure, the novel does allude to global warming as the underlining cause of this post-apocalyptic world.

I expected this novel to be the slow burn that The Road provided, building the characters and struggle while exploring the intended themes. However, I think this book burned a little too slowly, the flame went out halfway through and it turned into more of a chore to get through. Sure, the notions of communities, eco-terrorism and climate change were explored but for me it felt like I was being beaten over my head every chance they got. The book wanted to show off how smart and witty it was but, like many things that try to do this, the delivery never matched the intent.

California moved so slowly that as a reader, I was trapped in the wilderness of nothingness and I didn’t think I could escape. This was a real pity, everything seemed to start off so well; there was a plot arc and themes all set up and ready for execution. Somewhere on the way I feel like the author got a little lost and the readers were just following to her struggle to get back on track. I might come down hard on this novel; it isn’t too bad, there is a lot of potential and could have been a great book. For me it just didn’t work and wasn’t paced properly, I’m sure some people enjoyed it.

This review originally appeared on my blog: http://literary-exploration.com/2014/10/11/california-by-edan-lepucki/