From Kirkus Reviews: “Following up on I, Sarah Steinway (2018) Carter’s tale is set in a near future after rising seas touch off a catastrophe so chaotic—mega- droughts, bee die-offs, crop failures, man-eating plants, intelligent killer viruses, roving bands of psychotic raiders—that baffled survivors name it “the Whatchamacallit.” Among those survivors is Tova Goodman, a remarkably vigorous centenarian living in Placitas, New Mexico—now located on the Pacific coast—who weathers the upheaval thanks to a rich diet of fish and bugs, the protection of the local retirees’ militia, and the help of her neighbor Emanuel Epps, a spry, 103-year-old builder who’s doing an arty rehab of the town firehouse. Much of the book recollects episodes from Tova’s lifelong search to discover the meaning of good and evil. These include childhood conversations with her rabbi on the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah; schoolroom “duck and cover” drills; the deaths of young men she once knew; her readings of the moral philosophies of medieval Jewish sage Maimonides, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, and pop-theologian Harold S. Kushner. . . Carter’s yarn hopscotches between decades and various characters’ points of view . . . Her scenes of civilizational ruin are rendered with sharp, evocative realism: “Plastic. Heaps. Mounds. Sprawling floating reefs of it. Dead things clinging. Carcasses, some human by-god, people who had been lured by the idea of food on those glittering floating piles….Nothing edible. Just weird stunted plants; a single palm tree, Hollywood boulevard type, but fruitless.” . . . Carter’s prose is most affecting when she writes of the ordinary sorrows of the pre-flood era, like just before the death of Tova’s husband: “Tova climbed under the covers to just lie next to him during his opioid stupor. Would it be now? Or now? Or now? She drew him toward her, back to living, pulled him back for a few more moments, and a few more, and just one more moment; not now, not yet.” It’s these moments of emotional anguish, more than her conjuring of a richly imagined speculative future that will stick with readers. A vivid . . . vision of a broken world rendered in gorgeous, haunting prose.” — Kirkus Reviews $15.00 paperback 167 pages ISBN: 978-0-578-37687-5 Available from Amazon.com or by consignment