Ambitious, unwieldy, and unforgettable…
Palmer’s wildly ambitious novel is a literary experiment brimming with wit, rage, memory, and socio-political critique. In a future buckling under the weight of climate collapse, Beavan Broderick, once a fringe beaver ethologist and now a reluctant visionary, finds himself at the center of an unlikely alliance. While tending ponds and tracing the patterns of Canada’s national animal, BB crosses paths with a reclusive family experimenting with an impossibly strong, silk-like material. What begins as a shared curiosity evolves into a revolutionary breakthrough: a technology that brings airships back to the skies and lifts housing off the ground, borne aloft by aerostats.
BB narrates his life with a voice that is both furious and tender, absurd and deeply self-aware. A boy abandoned by his father and raised by a pragmatic mother, he enters the world with few certainties and a hunger to understand the systems that govern it. The novel’s structure mirrors BB’s mind: nonlinear, recursive, rich with detours, philosophical riffs, and transcripts of barroom rants. Some of these passages can feel like indulgent intellectual exercises, but they’re also sharply revealing of BB’s emotional state. The book’s emotional core is the slow excavation of family secrets. BB learns the truth about his father in fragments: through newspaper morgues, pawned possessions, Super 8 footage, and conversations with elderly lawyers who remember too much. Each discovery wounds and transforms him.
Palmer’s prose is astonishing in its range. At times, it reads like a systems theory textbook, at others like a raucous folk ballad. His characters are fully realized and often strange. The story spans vast terrain, from Canada’s coasts to Stanford, Denver, and Palm Desert, while tracing a cultural arc that is both bitingly satirical and unnervingly incisive. This is not a simple story. It resists narrative conventions, plunges into long asides about entropy, auction markets, and historical trauma, and often dares the reader to keep up. Yet the emotional payoff is immense. In one of its most powerful turns, BB watches footage of himself as a child, drunk, neglected, already lost, and sees for the first time the kind of environment he was raised in. The novel doesn’t resolve into redemption, but into reckoning: a man coming to grips with the ghosts that shaped him and deciding what kind of ancestor he wants to be. Fans of Duck’s Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann and The Overstory by Richard Powers will want to take a look.
A brilliant tale about the long arc of consequences and the strange, hopeful act of trying to understand the world through its ruins.
Pub date February 26, 2025
ISBN FriesenPress
Price $38.99 Hardcover, $24.99 Paperback