BOOK REVIEW: The Danger of Small Things

 

THE DANGER OF SMALL THINGS
by Caryl Lewis
Available now

One day, the last honeybee died, and the world changed. Now everyone is fixated on survival: working for the greater good at the expense of one's own life, bearing genetically optimized children, and eschewing things like love and art that can't be quantified by science. Teenage girl Jess is one of the many young girls working day in and day out to pollinate crops by hand. When she comes of age, she will be sent off to be a wife. But that's not enough for her.

With the help of a young guard and some like-minded girls in the camp, Jess puts the pollination brushes to a different use: art. Her beautiful protests stir up new feelings in her fellow workers, but could lead to trouble if the people in charge find out who's behind the new murals. And when Jess discovers how her superiors really live, while they eat meager rations and work to exhaustion, even her own life being at risk isn't enough to silence her.

The Danger of Small Things is very much a story taking place in extremis, and I find that any such speculative fiction is telling its story on a knife edge. Fail to push hard enough, and there's no longer a message; push too hard, and you wander into satire. Both silence the story trying to be told. While The Danger of Small Things occasionally ventures into the latter, it never goes so far that it becomes a parody of itself. By grounding itself in art and music, and by resting less on the inciting incident and more on how the inciting incident is exploited for the gain of others, it maintains its center even when it starts to slide. And all else aside, Jess's present-tense narrative style feels believable at every turn, worded with the natural poetry of a human rather than overwrought prose.

TEA PAIRING: Cozy Apple Spice
Apples are one of the many things lost to the collapse of society, and are often mentioned as one of the best and sweetest things one can have. With that in mind, we ought to enjoy what we have: this spiced apple black tea, originally created for the autumn season, is currently on final sale. Use my code KARA15 for 15% off this and other tea blends from Chapters Tea & Co.!