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The Sunlight Pilgrims
It's November of 2020, and the world is freezing over, each day colder than the last. There's snow in Israel; the Thames is overflowing; and an iceberg separated from the Fjords in Norway is expected to drift just off the coast of Scotland. As ice water melts into the Atlantic, frenzied London residents evacuate by the thousands for warmer temperatures down south--but not Dylan. Grieving and ready to build life anew, he heads north to bury his mother's and grandmother's ashes on the Scottish islands where they once lived.
Hundreds of miles away, twelve-year-old Estella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by in the snowy, mountainous Highlands, preparing for a record-breaking winter. Living out of a caravan, they spend their days digging through landfills, searching for anything with restorative and trading value. When Dylan arrives in their caravan park in the middle of the night, life changes course for Estella and Constance. Though the weather worsens, his presence brings a new light to daily life, and when the ultimate disaster finally strikes, they'll all be ready.
The Sunlight Pilgrims is a visionary story of courage and resilience in the midst of nature's most violent hour. It's by turns an homage to the portentous beauty of our natural world, and to just how strong we can be, if the will and the hope is there, to survive its worst.
Hundreds of miles away, twelve-year-old Estella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by in the snowy, mountainous Highlands, preparing for a record-breaking winter. Living out of a caravan, they spend their days digging through landfills, searching for anything with restorative and trading value. When Dylan arrives in their caravan park in the middle of the night, life changes course for Estella and Constance. Though the weather worsens, his presence brings a new light to daily life, and when the ultimate disaster finally strikes, they'll all be ready.
The Sunlight Pilgrims is a visionary story of courage and resilience in the midst of nature's most violent hour. It's by turns an homage to the portentous beauty of our natural world, and to just how strong we can be, if the will and the hope is there, to survive its worst.
310 pages, Hardcover
First published March 24, 2016
About the author
Jenni Fagan
30 books585 followersJenni Fagan has published four fiction novels, one non-fiction memoir, seven books of poetry and had scripts produced for stage and screen. She has three degrees, concluding as Dr. Of Philosophy, specialising in structuralism.
Jenni is an award winning, critically acclaimed poet and novelist. She is published in eight languages. A Granta Best of Young British Novelist (once-in-a-decade-accolade), Scottish Novelist of the Year (2016), Pushchart nominated, on lists for BBC International Short Story Prize, Impac Dublin, The Sunday Times Short Story Award, Encore, among others. The New York Times called her The Patron Saint of Literary Street Urchins.
Fagan is also an artist who exhibits canvas and sculptures, her bone artworks are on permanent display at Summerhall, where she kintsugi’d the building with poems in gold.
Jenni has written articles for the Independent, NY Times, Marie Claire. She has held Writer in Residence positions at the University of Edinburgh, Robert Louise Stevenson Fellowship and Gavin Wallace.
She has worked extensively with women in prison, and those from deprived backgrounds.
She is currently adapting The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh for tv, also The Panopticon, Luckenbooth and Hex.
Jenni is an award winning, critically acclaimed poet and novelist. She is published in eight languages. A Granta Best of Young British Novelist (once-in-a-decade-accolade), Scottish Novelist of the Year (2016), Pushchart nominated, on lists for BBC International Short Story Prize, Impac Dublin, The Sunday Times Short Story Award, Encore, among others. The New York Times called her The Patron Saint of Literary Street Urchins.
Fagan is also an artist who exhibits canvas and sculptures, her bone artworks are on permanent display at Summerhall, where she kintsugi’d the building with poems in gold.
Jenni has written articles for the Independent, NY Times, Marie Claire. She has held Writer in Residence positions at the University of Edinburgh, Robert Louise Stevenson Fellowship and Gavin Wallace.
She has worked extensively with women in prison, and those from deprived backgrounds.
She is currently adapting The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh for tv, also The Panopticon, Luckenbooth and Hex.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 565 reviews
June 20, 2022
HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!!
this is a gem of an apocalypse story. i'd read this author's book The Panopticon a few years back, and loved it, but this one is so very different in style and tone, it shows just how much authorial range ms fagan has. The Panopticon was gritty and harsh, but not without some really lovely bits. this one is slower, more deliberate and insightful, and the lovely languid writing is back and it is tremendously effective in this setting, where the world is slooooowwwwly ending as a new ice age rolls in.
oddly enough, the ice age isn't really the main focus of the book. it's more of a backdrop for the characters acting out their lives, and a way of marking time as it gets colder and colder with each subsequent chapter, all the way down to -70 C. the snow and cold and icebergs supply logistical obstacles, but also inspires some gorgeous imagery:
She picks up speed. Faster. Faster. She pedals harder. Air stings hew few inches of bare skin, so it is colder than ice floes on the North Sea - or even right at the bottom of the ocean where the skeletons hold hands or do the jitterbug or bang their fists on a whole roof of ice forming overhead.
if you're hoping for a realistic portrayal of how the world might end, this ain't it. this isn't a book in which people freak out and hoard food and take up religion and panic about their impending dooms. the problems are small, they are our problems: family, death, identity, love...
it all takes place in an isolated scottish caravan park, in a valley surrounded by hills, where dylan - a gigantic and heavily-tattooed, but gentle and thoughtful man, has just arrived to look into selling a caravan left to him in his mother's will, which he had no idea she'd owned. prior to this, he'd lived his whole life in london, in a crumbling movie house with his beloved mother and grandmother, which they operated together until the two women died and the property was repossessed. grieving and adrift, dylan arrives in the community, stunned by his multiple losses, and his introduction to his new home is the sight of a woman named constance sleepwalking in her front yard, polishing the moon.
constance is a fierce woman, protective of her eleven-year-old daughter stella (who until recently was her son cael), living her life on her own terms despite the gossip of her neighbors. part of the gossip results from her twenty-year-long romantic relationships with two men, on and off, frequently overlapping. one of them, alistair, is stella's father, who lives up the hill, but refuses to acknowledge stella as she is - occasionally dropping off presents clearly intended for the son he still stubbornly sees her as.
stella is a firecracker of a character - very much like the girls in The Panopticon - spirited, fond of cussing, vivacious and tough, but also vulnerable in her new identity, hurt and resentful by the reactions of those who knew her only as cael, including the nuns at her school, and her best friend lewis, whose friendship has just gotten considerably more complicated. but she's not broken-down by others; she maintains her sass and spirit:
They took her into a meeting in school and she had to say in advance that she wasn't a lesbian, or they wouldn't have let her even try to use the girls' changing room. They asked her if she was still a Christian. She explained that her family is not religious. They asked her what she knew of damnation. She asked them what they knew of autonomy. They asked her how she knew that word. She asked if they had met her mother. They said they would pray for her. She said it was not necessary. They asked if she might feel different in a few months, or if perhaps she should simply change for gym in the janitor's cupboard. She said she'd felt like this her whole life and no amount of praying was going to change it and she could use the janitor's cupboard to change, but she was a person, not a broom.
she adores her unconventional mother and their life together, This sums up my entire childhood: clever shit and apocalypse-survival skills, and she immediately befriends her new neighbor dylan, casting him in the role of pal and casual father figure.
the book is told from the perspectives of dylan and stella both, and we are not privy to the innerworkings of constance's mind. we only see her as they see her, which is an absolutely genius move on fagan's part. there is something so powerfully enigmatic and 'other' about constance - she is so attuned to her surroundings, and it's infinitely more mysterious to not know what she's thinking or feeling or planning. she remains a cipher, smart and strong and odd and independent, and it's so much more effective to never visit her interiors, just that she accepts stella while still mourning cael, and she teaches stella about life and duality in her own remarkable way: There is a half-female, half-male cardinal bird that is pure white down one side and bright red down the other! Google it.
it's just … beautiful. i don't know what else to say. it's lovely and magical and surprising, and both the characters and the language are phenomenal:
If the doctor asks her what she is most - she will tell him she is a wolf child.
Her mother is winter.
Their neighbor is the child of Nephilim.
Her biological male donor is a future bone teapot.
which sounds kooky, but is completely appropriate in context and is probably my favorite passage in the book.
i will say that the opening; the italicized prologue, is completely baffling at first, but plow through it and be rewarded because it will all make sense later, i promise.
it's a perfect mishmash of coming-of-age/coming-into-gender-identity story, with tentative romance elements, family secrets, the strength of community in facing the inevitable, with vivid descriptions and a perfectly understated ending.
you know, one of those books.
***********************************************
i don't even know if i'm qualified to review this one. what she has done here in under 300 pages is more accomplished than i can even unravel.
it's damn good.
i'll try to make this review have better words soon.
come to my blog!
this is a gem of an apocalypse story. i'd read this author's book The Panopticon a few years back, and loved it, but this one is so very different in style and tone, it shows just how much authorial range ms fagan has. The Panopticon was gritty and harsh, but not without some really lovely bits. this one is slower, more deliberate and insightful, and the lovely languid writing is back and it is tremendously effective in this setting, where the world is slooooowwwwly ending as a new ice age rolls in.
oddly enough, the ice age isn't really the main focus of the book. it's more of a backdrop for the characters acting out their lives, and a way of marking time as it gets colder and colder with each subsequent chapter, all the way down to -70 C. the snow and cold and icebergs supply logistical obstacles, but also inspires some gorgeous imagery:
She picks up speed. Faster. Faster. She pedals harder. Air stings hew few inches of bare skin, so it is colder than ice floes on the North Sea - or even right at the bottom of the ocean where the skeletons hold hands or do the jitterbug or bang their fists on a whole roof of ice forming overhead.
if you're hoping for a realistic portrayal of how the world might end, this ain't it. this isn't a book in which people freak out and hoard food and take up religion and panic about their impending dooms. the problems are small, they are our problems: family, death, identity, love...
it all takes place in an isolated scottish caravan park, in a valley surrounded by hills, where dylan - a gigantic and heavily-tattooed, but gentle and thoughtful man, has just arrived to look into selling a caravan left to him in his mother's will, which he had no idea she'd owned. prior to this, he'd lived his whole life in london, in a crumbling movie house with his beloved mother and grandmother, which they operated together until the two women died and the property was repossessed. grieving and adrift, dylan arrives in the community, stunned by his multiple losses, and his introduction to his new home is the sight of a woman named constance sleepwalking in her front yard, polishing the moon.
constance is a fierce woman, protective of her eleven-year-old daughter stella (who until recently was her son cael), living her life on her own terms despite the gossip of her neighbors. part of the gossip results from her twenty-year-long romantic relationships with two men, on and off, frequently overlapping. one of them, alistair, is stella's father, who lives up the hill, but refuses to acknowledge stella as she is - occasionally dropping off presents clearly intended for the son he still stubbornly sees her as.
stella is a firecracker of a character - very much like the girls in The Panopticon - spirited, fond of cussing, vivacious and tough, but also vulnerable in her new identity, hurt and resentful by the reactions of those who knew her only as cael, including the nuns at her school, and her best friend lewis, whose friendship has just gotten considerably more complicated. but she's not broken-down by others; she maintains her sass and spirit:
They took her into a meeting in school and she had to say in advance that she wasn't a lesbian, or they wouldn't have let her even try to use the girls' changing room. They asked her if she was still a Christian. She explained that her family is not religious. They asked her what she knew of damnation. She asked them what they knew of autonomy. They asked her how she knew that word. She asked if they had met her mother. They said they would pray for her. She said it was not necessary. They asked if she might feel different in a few months, or if perhaps she should simply change for gym in the janitor's cupboard. She said she'd felt like this her whole life and no amount of praying was going to change it and she could use the janitor's cupboard to change, but she was a person, not a broom.
she adores her unconventional mother and their life together, This sums up my entire childhood: clever shit and apocalypse-survival skills, and she immediately befriends her new neighbor dylan, casting him in the role of pal and casual father figure.
the book is told from the perspectives of dylan and stella both, and we are not privy to the innerworkings of constance's mind. we only see her as they see her, which is an absolutely genius move on fagan's part. there is something so powerfully enigmatic and 'other' about constance - she is so attuned to her surroundings, and it's infinitely more mysterious to not know what she's thinking or feeling or planning. she remains a cipher, smart and strong and odd and independent, and it's so much more effective to never visit her interiors, just that she accepts stella while still mourning cael, and she teaches stella about life and duality in her own remarkable way: There is a half-female, half-male cardinal bird that is pure white down one side and bright red down the other! Google it.
it's just … beautiful. i don't know what else to say. it's lovely and magical and surprising, and both the characters and the language are phenomenal:
If the doctor asks her what she is most - she will tell him she is a wolf child.
Her mother is winter.
Their neighbor is the child of Nephilim.
Her biological male donor is a future bone teapot.
which sounds kooky, but is completely appropriate in context and is probably my favorite passage in the book.
i will say that the opening; the italicized prologue, is completely baffling at first, but plow through it and be rewarded because it will all make sense later, i promise.
it's a perfect mishmash of coming-of-age/coming-into-gender-identity story, with tentative romance elements, family secrets, the strength of community in facing the inevitable, with vivid descriptions and a perfectly understated ending.
you know, one of those books.
***********************************************
i don't even know if i'm qualified to review this one. what she has done here in under 300 pages is more accomplished than i can even unravel.
it's damn good.
i'll try to make this review have better words soon.
come to my blog!
February 8, 2020
Truly one of the highlights of this year, this book....
Read a great review in the New York Times book review here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/boo...
“The Sunlight Pilgrims” is a stylistically quieter novel than Fagan’s bravura debut, “The Panopticon” — a fiery and voice-driven effort that landed her on Granta’s 2013 list of the best British novelists under 40 years old — but it is no less critical in its portrayal of marginalized people under the pressure of society’s norms....Fagan is a poet as well as a novelist, and many of her images of this unbidden winter are shot through with lyric beauty. Early on, we are told that in this worst of winters “icicles will grow to the size of narwhal tusks or the long bony finger of winter herself.” Later, when the threesome venture out of the caravan to witness an iceberg’s arrival, they observe “all those peaked figures of ice, like all of their ancestors have been caught by the elements on the long walk home, their souls captured by ice and snow, and below them the North Sea cracks and groans as ice floes creak and collide.”
The Sunlight Pilgrims is a humane, sad, funny, shimmeringly odd and beautiful novel.....it is a story about people in extreme circumstances finding one another, and finding themselves...
Snow falls steadily, a shiny white glitter against the dark outside.....
I already know this is going to be one of my reading highlights of 2016. What a magical book. What I call a rare gem.... Highly, highly recommended.
It fits into one of my favorite categories, apocalyptic, and yet, the story is much more about a small caravan community in Scotland, plummeting into a sort of 'ice age', an ultimate and grim winter wonderland. It's a loving story of a color ful set of people, Constance and her transgender, brave daughter Stella. About Dylan who comes out to live in the caravan park grieving for his mother Vivienne and gin-brewing gran Gunn who died shortly after each other... Meanwhile temperature drops to more than minus 50 C and a huge iceberg is approaching the Scottish coast...
Beautifully written, poetic and to the point at the same time, it's still, it's a story about loving bonds, it's a wonderful read.
A quirky quote: I offered your mother a glass of water once, she said she couldn't possibly drink the stuff; when I asked her why, she said 'Fish fuck in it, darling!'...
Read a great review in the New York Times book review here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/boo...
“The Sunlight Pilgrims” is a stylistically quieter novel than Fagan’s bravura debut, “The Panopticon” — a fiery and voice-driven effort that landed her on Granta’s 2013 list of the best British novelists under 40 years old — but it is no less critical in its portrayal of marginalized people under the pressure of society’s norms....Fagan is a poet as well as a novelist, and many of her images of this unbidden winter are shot through with lyric beauty. Early on, we are told that in this worst of winters “icicles will grow to the size of narwhal tusks or the long bony finger of winter herself.” Later, when the threesome venture out of the caravan to witness an iceberg’s arrival, they observe “all those peaked figures of ice, like all of their ancestors have been caught by the elements on the long walk home, their souls captured by ice and snow, and below them the North Sea cracks and groans as ice floes creak and collide.”
The Sunlight Pilgrims is a humane, sad, funny, shimmeringly odd and beautiful novel.....it is a story about people in extreme circumstances finding one another, and finding themselves...
Snow falls steadily, a shiny white glitter against the dark outside.....
I already know this is going to be one of my reading highlights of 2016. What a magical book. What I call a rare gem.... Highly, highly recommended.
It fits into one of my favorite categories, apocalyptic, and yet, the story is much more about a small caravan community in Scotland, plummeting into a sort of 'ice age', an ultimate and grim winter wonderland. It's a loving story of a color ful set of people, Constance and her transgender, brave daughter Stella. About Dylan who comes out to live in the caravan park grieving for his mother Vivienne and gin-brewing gran Gunn who died shortly after each other... Meanwhile temperature drops to more than minus 50 C and a huge iceberg is approaching the Scottish coast...
Beautifully written, poetic and to the point at the same time, it's still, it's a story about loving bonds, it's a wonderful read.
A quirky quote: I offered your mother a glass of water once, she said she couldn't possibly drink the stuff; when I asked her why, she said 'Fish fuck in it, darling!'...
July 10, 2016
The year is 2020, the world is getting colder, the Thames has frozen solid, snow in places where it doesn't usually snow and a huge glacier is heading towards Scotland. In a Scotland caravan park, Constance, her daughter Stella, though Stella used to be a he, and Dylan, a young man from London whose mother lived in the park and had recently died, are gearing up for the coldest winter ever. The descriptions of the weather, the snow, the cold and ice are phenomenal, one can feel this weather inside their bones, the images are that vivid.
The cold though surrounds a story of a mother and daughter and a young man who will learn things he did not expect. If ever I am in a survival situation I hope I know someone like Constance, she knows exactly what she and her daughter need to survive, from heat, supplies, and ways to stay alive. Stella, has to deal with kids, boys who were once her friends, but now that she is Stella, she is bullied, frowned on by the adults and accepted by only a few. So I guess in five years not much in the way of acceptance has changed.
Very different story, elegant, beautiful writing. A family story and a story about climate change blended together. Change being the main theme, within and without. Each chapter starts with the temperature and one sees it slowly falling, getting colder. Will these wonderful characters survive this winter? Amazing, unforgettable story.
ARC from publisher.
The cold though surrounds a story of a mother and daughter and a young man who will learn things he did not expect. If ever I am in a survival situation I hope I know someone like Constance, she knows exactly what she and her daughter need to survive, from heat, supplies, and ways to stay alive. Stella, has to deal with kids, boys who were once her friends, but now that she is Stella, she is bullied, frowned on by the adults and accepted by only a few. So I guess in five years not much in the way of acceptance has changed.
Very different story, elegant, beautiful writing. A family story and a story about climate change blended together. Change being the main theme, within and without. Each chapter starts with the temperature and one sees it slowly falling, getting colder. Will these wonderful characters survive this winter? Amazing, unforgettable story.
ARC from publisher.
June 19, 2016
It's eerie for sure and disconcerting to think that in this novel, taking place in 2020 only four years from now , that a new Ice Age is coming not just to this place in Scotland called Clachan Fells but all over the world. It's a tribute to the author that her descriptions make you feel the unbelievably cold temperatures and see the three suns in the sky , the phantom suns . The prologue is beautifully written setting the stage for the story, mainly of three unforgettable characters.
Within the framework of an apocalyptic event , that you believe is coming with this frigid weather, the coldest ever in a small town of Scotland at -65 , these people are still struggling to come to grips with the things that life dealt them. In addition to surviving the brutal cold they face grief, loneliness, bullying, while trying to discover their true selves.
Dylan is grieving the deaths of his mother and grandmother. "There is an ache he cannot shift and be is uncertain how something this physical has the remotest chance of going." The only life he's known is at the Babylon movie theater with his mother and grandmother and now they are gone along with the theater. He leaves London for a place in a caravan park that his mother left him in Scotland near her place of birth. Family secrets are revealed in a scrap book she leaves for him and with the family tree he discovers his connections to Stella, the 12 year old transgender girl and her unconventional mother, Constance who live next door to him in the caravan park .
The overriding theme, of course is the impact of global warming but yet there is so much more here and for the moments you focus on the things that haunt these somewhat fragile characters that you've come to care about , you almost forget about the looming iceberg. My favorite was Stella, who in spite of the loneliness and bullying knows exactly who she is . I also loved what a great mother Constance was , supporting and protecting Stella no matter what .
I only wish there had been an epilogue but I definitely would recommend this book.
Thanks to Hogarth/Crown Publishing and NetGalley.
February 14, 2019
My introduction to the fiction of Scottish author Jenni Fagan is The Sunlight Pilgrims. Published in 2016, this is a novel I moved up my reading docket based on positive reviews, its apocalyptic trappings and my winter theme to read fiction set in freezing environments. While I'm usually avid for new takes on doomsday and a new Ice Age grabbed my attention, I was not compelled by anything Fagan attempted to do or how she went about it. Had this novel been a door stopper, I would've abandoned and pinned a one-star rating on it, but then again, if it had been a door stopper, it would've forced Fagan to put more meat on the burger.
In November 2020, the melting of the polar ice caps has dumped freshwater into the salinity of the oceans, wrecking havoc with the North Atlantic Drift and ushering in a new Ice Age. Temperatures in London have dropped to -6 degrees and are expected to plummet further in the winter. Economic collapse has killed off commerce, with Dylan MacRae forced to surrender his family owned movie theater the Babylon to the bank. With both his grandmother Gunn and mother Vivienne dying recently and Dylan no longer able to live in the theater, he discovers that his mum purchased a caravan off the books and left it for him.
With Britons fleeing south, Dylan takes the bus north, to a caravan park in the Scottish village of Clachan Fells. Among his possessions are the ashes of his beloved grandmother and mother and his gin-making equipment. Trading freezing weather in London for arctic conditions in the caravan park, he befriends a survivalist single mother named Constance Fairbairn and her twelve-year-old Goth daughter Stella, who is one year into her transition from male to female. Dylan finds difficulty adapting to life without his family, while Stella comes to terms with her sexual identity and being treated as a pariah by the community.
Outside there is a blue, blue sky and frost has dusted the Clachan Fells mountains silver. Stells Fairbairn feels like she is going to cry, and nobody is even up yet. She is a swan wrapped in cellophane and everyone can see through her skin. Lewis will never kiss her again. She might as well forget it. She isn't pretty, and she's angular, and she has a penis. As tick boxes go for the most popular boy in school, those attributes are probably not high on his list. He did kiss her, though, and the only two people that know about it are her and him. He won't kiss her again in case any of his friends find out and think he's weird--that is why he won't do it again. Or because he already knows he'd like it. He wants to, though. He wants to even more than she does. That feeling. A light flutter in her chest. It squeezes in. Her ribs are embracing each other. The light outside is so bright now it almost feels sinister. Clenching her teeth. Hoping someone will want her one day. If Lewis tries to kiss her again she'll shoot him down, because he's too ashamed to do it in public. Lately, fear is following her. It is two tiny pit-a-pat feet always skittering behind her. When she turns there is nothing there, just the faintest footprints in the snow.
Buyer beware: The Sunlight Pilgrims takes a strong turn toward literary fiction and away from science fiction. A major shortcoming of the novel is its failure to explore its conceit. How would Britons prepare for an Ice Age? How would a city dweller survive? How would a caravan park come together, or not come together? Fagan isn't interested and could've easily set her story in a rugged environment, like The Shipping News, without dressing her story in science fiction clothes that don't fit. As if Cormac McCarthy were a major influence in her MFA study, Fagan also refuses to use quotation marks, and her dialogue is very precocious.
The light outside grows brighter. Stella passes down the muted YouTube clip to her mum on the bunk below and Constance watches it for a minute.
--Gender is closer than anyone likes to think. Men won't buy it because most of them are dickheads, she says.
--Is that the technical term. Mum?
--It is. We all share twenty-two identical chromosomes; the twenty-third is the sex chromosome and they don't kick in for at least ten weeks. Everyone starts out female and they stay like that for months.
--What, even Dad?
--Even Jesus. Go tell that to the nuns. For some embryos the Y-chromosome creates testosterone and female organs change into male ones; about three months in, what starts out as a clitoris, in the XY gene, gets bigger until it becomes, you know, a dick.
--Mum! Can't you say penis?
--It sounds so sterile.
--Why don't they teach this stuff in Sex Ed?
--Gender indoctrination. It's state imposed. The male body still holds the memory of it--the line below a scrotum is called a raphe line, and without it you'd have a vagina; every embryo has an opening at the genitals and it becomes labia and a vagina or, when male hormones kick in, the tissue fuses together and it leaves a scar, which is the raphe line.
--So, it's like a vagina line?
--It's totally a vagina line.
--Fucking hell!
--Swear jar, Stella. There's plenty male-and-females in one: snails, echinoderms; a cushion sea star spends its first three years female, then three years male. There's twenty-one species of fish on the spectrum: angel fish, sea bass, snook, clown fish, wrasse--a female wrasse turns into a male if the dominant male dies. The prettiest is a butterfly, where the male side has big black wings and the female side has smaller purple wings. It's a bilateral gynandromorph, male and female in one.
--You should go back to teaching, Mum.
--Fuck that! Kids are annoying little bastards, present company excluded.
--Swear jar!
Good hell. In addition to dialogue, I don't think Fagan writes men believably, with Dylan spending less time adapting and overcoming the numerous challenges of his environment and more time dwelling on the loss of his grandmother and mother. There's room in apocalyptic fiction to explore the inner world of a survivor; few apocalyptic novels do this as well as The Dog Stars and it's even touched on in the Mad Max pictures. The Sunlight Pilgrims doesn't meet the minimum expectations of its genre, doesn't introduce characters who are relatable and doesn't provide readable dialogue. It's a major disappointment.
Length: 78,138 words
In November 2020, the melting of the polar ice caps has dumped freshwater into the salinity of the oceans, wrecking havoc with the North Atlantic Drift and ushering in a new Ice Age. Temperatures in London have dropped to -6 degrees and are expected to plummet further in the winter. Economic collapse has killed off commerce, with Dylan MacRae forced to surrender his family owned movie theater the Babylon to the bank. With both his grandmother Gunn and mother Vivienne dying recently and Dylan no longer able to live in the theater, he discovers that his mum purchased a caravan off the books and left it for him.
With Britons fleeing south, Dylan takes the bus north, to a caravan park in the Scottish village of Clachan Fells. Among his possessions are the ashes of his beloved grandmother and mother and his gin-making equipment. Trading freezing weather in London for arctic conditions in the caravan park, he befriends a survivalist single mother named Constance Fairbairn and her twelve-year-old Goth daughter Stella, who is one year into her transition from male to female. Dylan finds difficulty adapting to life without his family, while Stella comes to terms with her sexual identity and being treated as a pariah by the community.
Outside there is a blue, blue sky and frost has dusted the Clachan Fells mountains silver. Stells Fairbairn feels like she is going to cry, and nobody is even up yet. She is a swan wrapped in cellophane and everyone can see through her skin. Lewis will never kiss her again. She might as well forget it. She isn't pretty, and she's angular, and she has a penis. As tick boxes go for the most popular boy in school, those attributes are probably not high on his list. He did kiss her, though, and the only two people that know about it are her and him. He won't kiss her again in case any of his friends find out and think he's weird--that is why he won't do it again. Or because he already knows he'd like it. He wants to, though. He wants to even more than she does. That feeling. A light flutter in her chest. It squeezes in. Her ribs are embracing each other. The light outside is so bright now it almost feels sinister. Clenching her teeth. Hoping someone will want her one day. If Lewis tries to kiss her again she'll shoot him down, because he's too ashamed to do it in public. Lately, fear is following her. It is two tiny pit-a-pat feet always skittering behind her. When she turns there is nothing there, just the faintest footprints in the snow.
Buyer beware: The Sunlight Pilgrims takes a strong turn toward literary fiction and away from science fiction. A major shortcoming of the novel is its failure to explore its conceit. How would Britons prepare for an Ice Age? How would a city dweller survive? How would a caravan park come together, or not come together? Fagan isn't interested and could've easily set her story in a rugged environment, like The Shipping News, without dressing her story in science fiction clothes that don't fit. As if Cormac McCarthy were a major influence in her MFA study, Fagan also refuses to use quotation marks, and her dialogue is very precocious.
The light outside grows brighter. Stella passes down the muted YouTube clip to her mum on the bunk below and Constance watches it for a minute.
--Gender is closer than anyone likes to think. Men won't buy it because most of them are dickheads, she says.
--Is that the technical term. Mum?
--It is. We all share twenty-two identical chromosomes; the twenty-third is the sex chromosome and they don't kick in for at least ten weeks. Everyone starts out female and they stay like that for months.
--What, even Dad?
--Even Jesus. Go tell that to the nuns. For some embryos the Y-chromosome creates testosterone and female organs change into male ones; about three months in, what starts out as a clitoris, in the XY gene, gets bigger until it becomes, you know, a dick.
--Mum! Can't you say penis?
--It sounds so sterile.
--Why don't they teach this stuff in Sex Ed?
--Gender indoctrination. It's state imposed. The male body still holds the memory of it--the line below a scrotum is called a raphe line, and without it you'd have a vagina; every embryo has an opening at the genitals and it becomes labia and a vagina or, when male hormones kick in, the tissue fuses together and it leaves a scar, which is the raphe line.
--So, it's like a vagina line?
--It's totally a vagina line.
--Fucking hell!
--Swear jar, Stella. There's plenty male-and-females in one: snails, echinoderms; a cushion sea star spends its first three years female, then three years male. There's twenty-one species of fish on the spectrum: angel fish, sea bass, snook, clown fish, wrasse--a female wrasse turns into a male if the dominant male dies. The prettiest is a butterfly, where the male side has big black wings and the female side has smaller purple wings. It's a bilateral gynandromorph, male and female in one.
--You should go back to teaching, Mum.
--Fuck that! Kids are annoying little bastards, present company excluded.
--Swear jar!
Good hell. In addition to dialogue, I don't think Fagan writes men believably, with Dylan spending less time adapting and overcoming the numerous challenges of his environment and more time dwelling on the loss of his grandmother and mother. There's room in apocalyptic fiction to explore the inner world of a survivor; few apocalyptic novels do this as well as The Dog Stars and it's even touched on in the Mad Max pictures. The Sunlight Pilgrims doesn't meet the minimum expectations of its genre, doesn't introduce characters who are relatable and doesn't provide readable dialogue. It's a major disappointment.
Length: 78,138 words
July 8, 2016
This book is cold.....
I enjoyed the characters in the book. I was expecting more to happen in the book. I thought they were going to be fighting the cold the whole time, but it's really about people and friendship and well yes, the cold.
They are talking throughout the book about looking at the three suns. I thought at first this was some crazy thing that happened with the Ice Age coming, we suddenly had three suns but no, this is what they all it in the book:
EXCERPT
--Parhelia. It's a phenomenon that looks like three suns, but the two on either side are just reflected light-it's something to do with ice crystals.
That little tidbit was nice to learn.
So we have Dylan who lives in an old Cinema his gran and mom used to run, but they have both passed and he is being turned out. Dylan finds some stuff from his mom telling him to go to Clachan Fells, that she bought a caravan there. This is where Dylan goes to live and he meets some nice people and some funny characters as well.
Dylan's next door neighbors are Stella and her mom Constance. They are really nice people and Dylan gets a little crush on Stella's mom. There is also Barnacle, he is a hoot and I just love him.
They are bracing for the worst Winter ever, maybe even an Ice Age. Then they learn that a huge ice berg is making it's way from Norway to their little caravan town.
When it gets there, things seem to go downhill pretty quick. I'm not really sure what to make of the ending. Even if I could, I can't really tell you if any of them make it or not.
Backtracking a little. When they were all friends in the caravan park it was sweet. Stella and her mom would go to the dump and find good furniture that Constance could fix and resale. This is how they made their living.
Stella was picked on by bullies but isn't there always something. Stella has a big story too, but NO SPOILERS.
All the while they are living their lives together for what seemed like a brief time. Eating together, drinking, telling stories, keeping warm!!! I enjoyed this part of the book because of the way they all connected.
But if your looking for a big time end of the world Ice Age book, this is not it.
*I would like to thank Blogging For Books for a print copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.*
MY BLOG: Melissa Martin's Reading List
I enjoyed the characters in the book. I was expecting more to happen in the book. I thought they were going to be fighting the cold the whole time, but it's really about people and friendship and well yes, the cold.
They are talking throughout the book about looking at the three suns. I thought at first this was some crazy thing that happened with the Ice Age coming, we suddenly had three suns but no, this is what they all it in the book:
EXCERPT
--Parhelia. It's a phenomenon that looks like three suns, but the two on either side are just reflected light-it's something to do with ice crystals.
That little tidbit was nice to learn.
So we have Dylan who lives in an old Cinema his gran and mom used to run, but they have both passed and he is being turned out. Dylan finds some stuff from his mom telling him to go to Clachan Fells, that she bought a caravan there. This is where Dylan goes to live and he meets some nice people and some funny characters as well.
Dylan's next door neighbors are Stella and her mom Constance. They are really nice people and Dylan gets a little crush on Stella's mom. There is also Barnacle, he is a hoot and I just love him.
They are bracing for the worst Winter ever, maybe even an Ice Age. Then they learn that a huge ice berg is making it's way from Norway to their little caravan town.
When it gets there, things seem to go downhill pretty quick. I'm not really sure what to make of the ending. Even if I could, I can't really tell you if any of them make it or not.
Backtracking a little. When they were all friends in the caravan park it was sweet. Stella and her mom would go to the dump and find good furniture that Constance could fix and resale. This is how they made their living.
Stella was picked on by bullies but isn't there always something. Stella has a big story too, but NO SPOILERS.
All the while they are living their lives together for what seemed like a brief time. Eating together, drinking, telling stories, keeping warm!!! I enjoyed this part of the book because of the way they all connected.
But if your looking for a big time end of the world Ice Age book, this is not it.
*I would like to thank Blogging For Books for a print copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.*
MY BLOG: Melissa Martin's Reading List
Read
August 14, 2016Not going to rate this - putting it into my abandoned pile. Good writing - but because I'm not inclined to read the blurbs anymore prior to reading, I didn't realize this was YA. I'm not a fan and really need to mentally prepare myself for one. This has gotten rave reviews from some of my fondest GR friends (who I trust immensely). So, don't be put off by me. Just can't do it for the YA factor.
September 1, 2016
I'd rate this 3.5 stars.
People often comment that there are not many original ideas out there. While that seems true sometimes, at other times you find a book that is pretty unique in certain ways, and isn't at all what you expected. That was definitely the case with Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims . While not everything meshed the way I had hoped, this was a unique and surprising book, and it definitely has stayed in my mind.
It's 2020 and the world is in the grips of the coldest temperatures on record, hitting below zero every day. There's snow in places there never was, rivers are overflowing and then freezing, and a giant iceberg is making its way from Norway to the coast of Scotland. People are panicking, rioting in the streets, and wondering if this is the end of the world. Those who can are fleeing to warmer temperatures, not that there are many places where those can be found.
While he'd like to head to what he believes are warmer climes in Vietnam, Dylan MacRae is on a mission. Reeling from the losses of both his beloved grandmother and mother, and with his family's movie theater being foreclosed upon, he travels to the Scottish Highlands town of Clachan Fells, where his mother apparently bought a caravan (trailer) before her death. He hopes to eventually get to the Orkney Islands, where his grandmother was from, to scatter both of their ashes.
When he arrives in Clachan Fells, he finds a community of people trying to understand what is coming and fearing the worst, expecting that this endless, brutal, unprecedented winter will be deadly for so many. He meets Constance Fairbairn, a survivalist of sorts, and her 12-year-old daughter, Stella, both of whom intrigue him in different ways. Constance lives by her own set of rules and has been judged by her fellow residents for years, and doesn't seem to care—except where their judgment affects Stella.
"Before it was just poverty, pestilence, terrorists, pedophiles, drugs, eating disorders, online grooming, meteors skimming a bit too close for comfort. Now every single person...looks like they are terrified they're all about to become frozen corpses."
Dylan quickly gets enmeshed in Clachan Fells life, and becomes a vital part of Constance and Stella's lives. His presence is welcomed by some but not all, and he finds he is actually more connected to the community than he thought. Stella struggles with identity and self-esteem issues, and is torn between wanting the approval of others and not caring. Beyond worrying about their survival, Constance wants her daughter's life to be easier than hers has been.
This book was intriguing and had surprising emotional depth, as I expected the book to be more about surviving this somewhat-dystopian environment. The characters were tremendously compelling and I found myself rooting for them. I just felt at times the book didn't get fully enmeshed in its plot, and brought up points that it never resolved. My biggest pet peeve about this book, however, was that Fagan didn't use quotation marks when characters spoke, simply m-dashes, so you couldn't distinguish when different characters were talking to one another, or even who said what.
Still, this is more a story about finding yourself and tapping into your own strength than it is about surviving the elements. Jenni Fagan is a talented storyteller, and this book will remain in my mind for a while.
NetGalley and Crown Publishing provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!
See all of my reviews at http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blo....
People often comment that there are not many original ideas out there. While that seems true sometimes, at other times you find a book that is pretty unique in certain ways, and isn't at all what you expected. That was definitely the case with Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims . While not everything meshed the way I had hoped, this was a unique and surprising book, and it definitely has stayed in my mind.
It's 2020 and the world is in the grips of the coldest temperatures on record, hitting below zero every day. There's snow in places there never was, rivers are overflowing and then freezing, and a giant iceberg is making its way from Norway to the coast of Scotland. People are panicking, rioting in the streets, and wondering if this is the end of the world. Those who can are fleeing to warmer temperatures, not that there are many places where those can be found.
While he'd like to head to what he believes are warmer climes in Vietnam, Dylan MacRae is on a mission. Reeling from the losses of both his beloved grandmother and mother, and with his family's movie theater being foreclosed upon, he travels to the Scottish Highlands town of Clachan Fells, where his mother apparently bought a caravan (trailer) before her death. He hopes to eventually get to the Orkney Islands, where his grandmother was from, to scatter both of their ashes.
When he arrives in Clachan Fells, he finds a community of people trying to understand what is coming and fearing the worst, expecting that this endless, brutal, unprecedented winter will be deadly for so many. He meets Constance Fairbairn, a survivalist of sorts, and her 12-year-old daughter, Stella, both of whom intrigue him in different ways. Constance lives by her own set of rules and has been judged by her fellow residents for years, and doesn't seem to care—except where their judgment affects Stella.
"Before it was just poverty, pestilence, terrorists, pedophiles, drugs, eating disorders, online grooming, meteors skimming a bit too close for comfort. Now every single person...looks like they are terrified they're all about to become frozen corpses."
Dylan quickly gets enmeshed in Clachan Fells life, and becomes a vital part of Constance and Stella's lives. His presence is welcomed by some but not all, and he finds he is actually more connected to the community than he thought. Stella struggles with identity and self-esteem issues, and is torn between wanting the approval of others and not caring. Beyond worrying about their survival, Constance wants her daughter's life to be easier than hers has been.
This book was intriguing and had surprising emotional depth, as I expected the book to be more about surviving this somewhat-dystopian environment. The characters were tremendously compelling and I found myself rooting for them. I just felt at times the book didn't get fully enmeshed in its plot, and brought up points that it never resolved. My biggest pet peeve about this book, however, was that Fagan didn't use quotation marks when characters spoke, simply m-dashes, so you couldn't distinguish when different characters were talking to one another, or even who said what.
Still, this is more a story about finding yourself and tapping into your own strength than it is about surviving the elements. Jenni Fagan is a talented storyteller, and this book will remain in my mind for a while.
NetGalley and Crown Publishing provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!
See all of my reviews at http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blo....
June 20, 2016
Wow, this book was the perfect combination of scary and intriguing! We are in Scotland where everything is covered in frost and snow. Actually, all of the world is covered in what everyone fears is going to be the next Ice Age and the extinction of humanity. The scary part is that this story takes place only 4 years from now, in 2020!
While this story is quite claustrophobic and chills you to the bones, I love how it comes with a glimpse of hope. Dylan, Stella and Constance get to know each other in snowy Scotland, and their relationship is what keeps them warm during this awful winter. This shows that even though the world seems to be at an end, it's still possible to blossom and form new, intimate relationships.
Furthermore, all three characters are so unique and appropriately quirky that they warm your heart while reading about icebergs, blue fingers and horrible tv news in a constant loop.
Funnily enough, this book is very much different from what I normally like to read, and I wasn't sure whether to rate it 5 stars or not. It wasn't overwhelmingly beautiful from start to end, but there was something about it that took my breath away, and at the end of the day I couldn't put my finger on anything that was wrong with it. This was one of the best reading surprises this year so far, and it definitely deserves its 5 stars from me.
While this story is quite claustrophobic and chills you to the bones, I love how it comes with a glimpse of hope. Dylan, Stella and Constance get to know each other in snowy Scotland, and their relationship is what keeps them warm during this awful winter. This shows that even though the world seems to be at an end, it's still possible to blossom and form new, intimate relationships.
Furthermore, all three characters are so unique and appropriately quirky that they warm your heart while reading about icebergs, blue fingers and horrible tv news in a constant loop.
Funnily enough, this book is very much different from what I normally like to read, and I wasn't sure whether to rate it 5 stars or not. It wasn't overwhelmingly beautiful from start to end, but there was something about it that took my breath away, and at the end of the day I couldn't put my finger on anything that was wrong with it. This was one of the best reading surprises this year so far, and it definitely deserves its 5 stars from me.
July 17, 2016
3.5 Stars. Three people living their day-to-day lives in a time of great upheaval. 5-star character/setting & beautiful writing, but I was at a 2-star level of engagement. It was slow moving and not much happened. That isn't always a deal-breaker for me, but I just didn't click with this book.
It's November 2020 and a terrible cold is descending upon the globe, the worst winter on record. Dylan MacRae is grieving the recent loss of his mother and grandmother, as well as his home and livelihood. On the way to burying his mother's and grandmother's ashes, he stops in a caravan park where his mother frequently stayed. The caravan is next-door to Constance and her twelve-year-old daughter Stella. Dylan is instantly attracted to Constance and he becomes close friends with her daughter. Spending time with is neighbors makes him realize that he has spent his life existing rather than living. While going through his mother's belongings, he learns a devastating secret that connects him to Constance and Stella in unexpected ways.
I've been reading so many cold weather books lately! The entire story takes place during the winter of 2020-2021. It's divided into four parts and the temperature plummets to dangerous levels as the months pass. The characters live in a caravan park in the Scottish village of Clachan Falls. I enjoyed the unique little village and its eccentric inhabitants. It was like a bleak Stars Hollow! The writing is poetic and there's is an urgent, exuberant quality to it that made me feel wonderment for nature. There are no quotation marks; the dialogue is differentiated with dashes. I didn't have trouble following the conversations like I have with some novels with unique punctuation usage (See: All Things Cease to Appear). The story alternates between the perspectives of Dylan and Stella. Constance is also a central character, but we only view her through the eyes of Dylan and Stella.
I had to force myself through Dylan's chapters, but I did love his relationship with Stella. Stella is my favorite part book and I was most engaged during her coming-of-age sections. She is mature, self-assured, and has a great sense of humor. She came out as transgender thirteen months before the book starts. Her father refuses to acknowledge her transition and she is bullied by the kids at school. She also worries about her mother and thinks Constance deserves much better than the men she chooses.
There are interesting parallels drawn with the intensifying weather and Stella's rapidly changing situation. While the climate is going through an intense change and a glacier creeps its way to the shores of her community, Stella's starts going through puberty. She wants to take hormone pills, but dangerous weather and the attitudes of others are a huge roadblock. There are also tie-ins with the past coming to roost in the present: the light from stars, a glacier from a million years ago bringing a winter ("If the world has fifteen million years of frozen geology there and it can enter the present and melt and bring forth another Ice Age..."), and Constance's conversation with Stella about embryos following a female blueprint for the first ten weeks.
Constance is a survivalist. I admired her resourcefulness and determination."Luck and tenacity are her only employer." She is Stella's biggest advocate and her biggest fear is not being able to protect Stella in a cruel and unforgiving world. Constance has two lovers and the community judges her for it, though her lovers escape the same judgment. Constance knows what she wants. She doesn't hide who she is and she doesn't care what anyone thinks.
Now for what I didn't like! The story moved at a glacial pace and I wasn't engaged in the story as a whole. I don't always dislike slow-moving. character-driven books. A few things happened here:
(1) While I understand the comparisons to Station Eleven, those comparisons also had me expecting a little more plot.
(2) If I'm already disinterested, poetic writing that sometimes drifts into streams of consciousness intensifies that feeling.
(3) I kept feeling teased with action (using the word 'action' lightly here). Anytime something interesting happened or I felt the tension build, the scene would cut and we would move forward in time. The parts I was most interested in happened offstage. It drew attention to how little was actually happening outside of the character's thoughts and I lost patience. The characters do experience growth, but it was so gradual that it felt like nothing was happening.
Despite my reservations about the rest of the book. I thought the ending was appropriate. It's possible I assumed too much about what happened. It was very abrupt. I would have LOVED an epilogue that mirrored the beautifully-written prologue!
In conclusion: I was disinterested for the most part, but I loved Stella and the setting enough to keep reading. I think the same part of me that had difficulty appreciating Fates & Furies (especially Lotto's section) had difficulty getting into The Sunlight Pilgrims. It was one of those "It's not you, it's me!" books. It's receiving very high ratings from many respected reviewers. If you are looking for a quiet literary book with interesting characters and an immersive setting, this book may be for you. Here is a list of books I thought of while reading:
• Becoming Nicole: True story about a transgender girl and her family. Stella's experience mirrors Nicole's in many ways.
• The Dog Stars: Surviving in a post-apocalyptic world, grief, coping, global catastrophe not the main point.
• The Quality of Silence: Set in the modern world and plot-driven, but interesting mother/daughter relationship and Arctic setting. 10-year-old deaf girl experiences bullying because of her differences.
• Good Morning, Midnight : I'm about 75% through this one right now. It shares many qualities with The Sunlight Pilgrims: Quiet, character-driven novel, post-apocalyptic, surviving in freezing temperatures (Antarctica), the global catastrophe takes a backseat to internal struggles, etc. Oddly enough, the things I didn't like in The Sunlight Pilgrims, I am loving in this Good Morning, Midnight!
_____________________
I received this book for free from LibraryThing Early Reviewers program and Hogarth books in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The publication date is July 19, 2016.
All the villagers look worried and that is the worst thing. Before it was just poverty, pestilence, terrorists, pedophiles, drugs, eating disorders, online grooming, meteors skimming a bit too close for comfort. Now every single person in this hall looks like they are terrified they're all about to become frozen corpses. For the first time since the news broke, Stella gets this stabbing feeling in her heart that must be some new kind of fear. [Stella]
It's November 2020 and a terrible cold is descending upon the globe, the worst winter on record. Dylan MacRae is grieving the recent loss of his mother and grandmother, as well as his home and livelihood. On the way to burying his mother's and grandmother's ashes, he stops in a caravan park where his mother frequently stayed. The caravan is next-door to Constance and her twelve-year-old daughter Stella. Dylan is instantly attracted to Constance and he becomes close friends with her daughter. Spending time with is neighbors makes him realize that he has spent his life existing rather than living. While going through his mother's belongings, he learns a devastating secret that connects him to Constance and Stella in unexpected ways.
Something in him comes from this rock, these mountains, this landscape, something older than time and generational -- all those links to people who survived this place and thrived and lived, all those suicidal monks and one lone sunlight pilgrim, butt-naked and tough as hell. [Dylan]
I've been reading so many cold weather books lately! The entire story takes place during the winter of 2020-2021. It's divided into four parts and the temperature plummets to dangerous levels as the months pass. The characters live in a caravan park in the Scottish village of Clachan Falls. I enjoyed the unique little village and its eccentric inhabitants. It was like a bleak Stars Hollow! The writing is poetic and there's is an urgent, exuberant quality to it that made me feel wonderment for nature. There are no quotation marks; the dialogue is differentiated with dashes. I didn't have trouble following the conversations like I have with some novels with unique punctuation usage (See: All Things Cease to Appear). The story alternates between the perspectives of Dylan and Stella. Constance is also a central character, but we only view her through the eyes of Dylan and Stella.
All their robot children like their knobs and buttons shiny and silver and none of them understand what a real robot has to withstand, if they are to have so much rust but still be able to run as fast as the others on sports day or sing as loud at Christmas. The carols! 'Little Donkey', the verse about Mary carrying the heavy load, it always makes her cry. [Stella]
I had to force myself through Dylan's chapters, but I did love his relationship with Stella. Stella is my favorite part book and I was most engaged during her coming-of-age sections. She is mature, self-assured, and has a great sense of humor. She came out as transgender thirteen months before the book starts. Her father refuses to acknowledge her transition and she is bullied by the kids at school. She also worries about her mother and thinks Constance deserves much better than the men she chooses.
There are interesting parallels drawn with the intensifying weather and Stella's rapidly changing situation. While the climate is going through an intense change and a glacier creeps its way to the shores of her community, Stella's starts going through puberty. She wants to take hormone pills, but dangerous weather and the attitudes of others are a huge roadblock. There are also tie-ins with the past coming to roost in the present: the light from stars, a glacier from a million years ago bringing a winter ("If the world has fifteen million years of frozen geology there and it can enter the present and melt and bring forth another Ice Age..."), and Constance's conversation with Stella about embryos following a female blueprint for the first ten weeks.
Stella is like the wind outside and Constance is the fire. The wind is gentle, blowing lightly to brighten the flames, to stop the fire going out. [Dylan]
Constance is a survivalist. I admired her resourcefulness and determination."Luck and tenacity are her only employer." She is Stella's biggest advocate and her biggest fear is not being able to protect Stella in a cruel and unforgiving world. Constance has two lovers and the community judges her for it, though her lovers escape the same judgment. Constance knows what she wants. She doesn't hide who she is and she doesn't care what anyone thinks.
Stella tugs the wolf-head until the ears sit perfectly; two long furry arms snake down on either side of her braids and the fur is white, like the wolf walked right out of the snow -- like winter herself created it from particles of ice and dust and sent it out to find a mortal girl who isn't afraid of the big bad wolf, who knows how to use an axe and stir her own porridge, who knows that worth isn't something you let another person set for you, it is something you set for yourself. [Stella]
Now for what I didn't like! The story moved at a glacial pace and I wasn't engaged in the story as a whole. I don't always dislike slow-moving. character-driven books. A few things happened here:
(1) While I understand the comparisons to Station Eleven, those comparisons also had me expecting a little more plot.
(2) If I'm already disinterested, poetic writing that sometimes drifts into streams of consciousness intensifies that feeling.
(3) I kept feeling teased with action (using the word 'action' lightly here). Anytime something interesting happened or I felt the tension build, the scene would cut and we would move forward in time. The parts I was most interested in happened offstage. It drew attention to how little was actually happening outside of the character's thoughts and I lost patience. The characters do experience growth, but it was so gradual that it felt like nothing was happening.
Despite my reservations about the rest of the book. I thought the ending was appropriate. It's possible I assumed too much about what happened. It was very abrupt. I would have LOVED an epilogue that mirrored the beautifully-written prologue!
All those little lies, left unsaid, in families; all the things that then become unsayable.
The selfish dead fuck off and leave us with half-truths and questions and random relations and bankruptcy and debt and bad hearts and questionable genetics and stupid habits and DNA codes for diseases and they never mention all the things that are coming -- like a fight at a wedding, it just breaks out one day. [Dylan]
In conclusion: I was disinterested for the most part, but I loved Stella and the setting enough to keep reading. I think the same part of me that had difficulty appreciating Fates & Furies (especially Lotto's section) had difficulty getting into The Sunlight Pilgrims. It was one of those "It's not you, it's me!" books. It's receiving very high ratings from many respected reviewers. If you are looking for a quiet literary book with interesting characters and an immersive setting, this book may be for you. Here is a list of books I thought of while reading:
• Becoming Nicole: True story about a transgender girl and her family. Stella's experience mirrors Nicole's in many ways.
• The Dog Stars: Surviving in a post-apocalyptic world, grief, coping, global catastrophe not the main point.
• The Quality of Silence: Set in the modern world and plot-driven, but interesting mother/daughter relationship and Arctic setting. 10-year-old deaf girl experiences bullying because of her differences.
• Good Morning, Midnight : I'm about 75% through this one right now. It shares many qualities with The Sunlight Pilgrims: Quiet, character-driven novel, post-apocalyptic, surviving in freezing temperatures (Antarctica), the global catastrophe takes a backseat to internal struggles, etc. Oddly enough, the things I didn't like in The Sunlight Pilgrims, I am loving in this Good Morning, Midnight!
Stella holds the clear tusk out in front of her -- puts it up to her head as if she is the unicorn -- she spins around, holding the icicle out in front of her as a spear- - jabbing it into air to show the spirit plane that she is her mother's daughter -- that the child of a wolf may not feel like she has fangs until she finds herself facing the moon, but they are still there the whole time regardless.
_____________________
I received this book for free from LibraryThing Early Reviewers program and Hogarth books in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The publication date is July 19, 2016.
July 9, 2016
This is one of those books. Any reservations I had left even after reading glowing reviews disappeared and I found that I was always eager to return to Jennie Fagan’s story of nuclear winter set in Scotland. That the setting is only a mere four years away made it all the more compelling.
When temperatures begin to plunge, there is the inevitable social and economic crisis associated, but while Fagan incorporates those issues, the focus remains on the people. The setting, while bitterly cold even at the start, is beautifully revealed through Fagan’s lovely prose. The characters are so utterly normal underneath their quirks and unconventionality, so relatable. Even Dylan MacRae, a rather unusual soul, who leaves his family’s Soho theatre behind, following his mother’s wish, carrying his mother, and grandmother back to the Scotland’s highlands of her younger years. Stella, a young trans-girl, and her exceptional mother Constance. At their core, these are just everyday people going about their everyday lives under newly extraordinary circumstances. All the while news continually shows footage of this new “Ice Age” on their horizon. Despite these predictions, this floating iceberg of significant proportions changing the climate of the world, the focus is on making do through the winter, waiting for the Spring, with hope and appreciation for the beauty in their changing environment. The parhelia – three suns appearing in the sky. The frost flowers made from curls of ice, each petal perfection only winter can create, this newly forming world is seen through appreciative and hopeful eyes.
Dylan’s mother has left him the trailer she owned at some time in the past, and a scrapbook. Dylan’s heart yearns for the Babylon movie theatre he ran with his mother and grandmother. He hopes to set up a makeshift theatre in the summer, tying up sheets for a screen. When Dylan arrives at the caravan park, the community where Stella and Constance live in Clachan Fells’s Ash Lane, his eyes take in the “row of silver bullet caravans,” the mountain range around them, and the sight of a sleepwalking Constance out in the yard, polishing the moon. He’s a bit smitten.
Stella and Constance live in the nearest trailer. Stella eagerly befriends Dylan, and it isn’t long before she invites her new friend to dinner, where he officially meets Constance. Stella’s hoping they’ll strike up a friendship or romance. The three grow to depend on each other as the nights grow colder, spending more time together as time slips by.
While global warming is central to the overall picture, this is really about three somewhat dispirited, but strong individuals, each with a unique and compelling story of their own, and how, and when, their lives become entwined.
Pub Date: 19 July 2016
Many thanks to Hogarth/Crown Publishing and NetGalley and author Jenni Fagan
May 27, 2016
I think I would group this book in the same pool as Station Eleven - a literary novel playing with a setting of destruction to explore other themes. As people who know me know, this might hint at a lesser enjoyment of the book for me than I think other people will have. I've read many disaster novels and have some baseline expectations for the realism I require to find truth in the story.
In this book it is an ice age instead of a virus, with a smaller cast of characters and narrower themes of sexual identity (one character is transgender and suffering from lack of good medicine/treatment due to the disaster). At the same time the science feels inconsistent and more of a flavor than a reality. For instance, people are chopping wood at -20 degrees and at -6 degrees some children die by falling through the ice on a lake. An iceberg is simultaneously encroaching on the small Scottish village where the characters are living in a mobile home park ("caravan") and melting, raising the water level. (Can this happen in -44 degrees?) These kinds of seeming impossibilities pulled me out of the story a bit. It is possible that this IS the science but it didn't quite feel logical. And while almost all of Europe is frozen in, and nobody can get food, they speak of fishing and make cannibalism jokes (whereas everyone seems to assume that as long as they have enough heat for the winter, they will be able to take care of the details in the spring/summer... I'm not sure ice ages are that short or that forgiving.)
While an ice age is interesting, I think the meat of this story is Stella and her journey of identity - how to navigate bullying and personhood is always compelling no matter the context. In fact, the ice age slows that down and limits her options considerably, in frustrating ways. Dylan's story is interesting until he ends up sleeping with a completely different character than I expected, which also serves to move him more into the background. His backstory and family tree discovery seem unnecessary and muddy the flow a bit. Shouldn't it be the ice age that is the most startling thing?
Solid 3.5 stars, I expect most literary readers to give it a 4 or higher, and I would love to reward the author in some way for a fair portrayal of the confusing world of a trans teenager.
Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
In this book it is an ice age instead of a virus, with a smaller cast of characters and narrower themes of sexual identity (one character is transgender and suffering from lack of good medicine/treatment due to the disaster). At the same time the science feels inconsistent and more of a flavor than a reality. For instance, people are chopping wood at -20 degrees and at -6 degrees some children die by falling through the ice on a lake. An iceberg is simultaneously encroaching on the small Scottish village where the characters are living in a mobile home park ("caravan") and melting, raising the water level. (Can this happen in -44 degrees?) These kinds of seeming impossibilities pulled me out of the story a bit. It is possible that this IS the science but it didn't quite feel logical. And while almost all of Europe is frozen in, and nobody can get food, they speak of fishing and make cannibalism jokes (whereas everyone seems to assume that as long as they have enough heat for the winter, they will be able to take care of the details in the spring/summer... I'm not sure ice ages are that short or that forgiving.)
While an ice age is interesting, I think the meat of this story is Stella and her journey of identity - how to navigate bullying and personhood is always compelling no matter the context. In fact, the ice age slows that down and limits her options considerably, in frustrating ways. Dylan's story is interesting until he ends up sleeping with a completely different character than I expected, which also serves to move him more into the background. His backstory and family tree discovery seem unnecessary and muddy the flow a bit. Shouldn't it be the ice age that is the most startling thing?
Solid 3.5 stars, I expect most literary readers to give it a 4 or higher, and I would love to reward the author in some way for a fair portrayal of the confusing world of a trans teenager.
Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
July 31, 2017
This book is something else. You better sit down somewhere cosy while you read this, because the story is gripping, intriguing and above all it’s cold.
It’s November 2020 and a terrible cold is descending upon the globe, the worst winter in centuries. The Thames freezes over and hundreds of people die from the icy weather. In these harsh times we follow Dylan, Constance and Stella as they try to survive the low temperatures and the lack of sunlight, as well as their own personal problems.
The Sunlight Pilgrims is the second book by author Jenni Fagan and it’s a slow book. This is a good thing because the calm pace makes you able to better enjoy the beautiful prose, the truly chilling descriptions of the ice and snow, and the bonds that Dylan, Constance and Stella develop with each other.
In a way this book reminded me of a book I read earlier this year (The Trees by Ali Shaw) because in both books a natural disaster forms the backdrop to the problems of the MC’s, which are the actual driving force of the story.
The strongest character in this book to me is Stella. She’s 12-year old, self-assured girl with a great sense of humour, but she’s also a male-to-female transgender. I’ve never read about a (young) trans-character before but I found the way Fagan described Stella and the struggle with her identity just beautiful and very realistic.
In the book Stella started her transition thirteen months ago and while her coming-out is met with disapproval from the community, her crush, and her own father, she keeps her head up. Fagan draws an interesting parallel between the upcoming winter and Stella’s body going through puberty: while the temperatures drop, Stella’s gender dysphoria increases.
You can’t help but fall in love with Stella’s determination and grit. Her gender is an important part of her character but never the most defining one: Stella remains a 12-year old girl who worries about her crush and gets excited about the snow. She’s a transgender but she’s also a child, and I loved how her mother and Dylan realized this and supported her unconditionally.
Dylan...was okay. He is a newcomer to the Scottish town of Clachan Fells and moved there because both his beloved grandmother and mother passed away in the last 6 months, and he was forced to sell their family movie-theatre. Dylan therefore doesn’t only deal with grief and loss, but also with feelings of failure. He just doesn’t want to face those emotions, and so he spends the first 40% of the book befriending Stella and falling in love with her mother.
In the end I do think he’s an interesting MC and he’s definitely a good person, but I just hated how in the beginning Dylan’s moments of grief were overshadowed by his crush on Constance.
Constance though, I absolutely loved. The woman is independent, resourceful and tough as nails. She’s a survivalist and no matter how hard life has been to her, she’s willing to do everything to keep herself and her child safe. That vow has gotten harder since Stella’s transition, so Constance biggest concern in this book is, besides battling the cruel winter, to help and defend her daughter as best as she can. I was glad that Dylan became her ally in this, but the mother-daughter relationship between Constance and Stella was one of the best parts of this book.
Criticism: As my review shows, I found the characters stronger and more compelling than the story itself. Both are intriguing and the calm pace worked well in slowly revealing the depth of everyone’s problems, but it also ate away my reading-enthusiasm. Especially Dylan’s first chapters were a pain to read. I also disliked how the writer used m-dashes instead of quotation marks, so it wasn’t always clear who said what.
The ending of the book felt me feeling lost. I’ve liked to have a short epilogue to be certain of spring and a hope of a new start, because while I know everyone’s going to be okay, I’d have liked to be sure.
Overall, this book is about identity: who are we as a person, what is our place in our family, and on a broader level, who do you want to seem to be to the outside world?
It’s about trusting yourself and relying on others in dark times, and while the plot isn’t as strong, the prose and the characters definitely are. A perfect book for this fall/winter. 3,5 stars.
It’s November 2020 and a terrible cold is descending upon the globe, the worst winter in centuries. The Thames freezes over and hundreds of people die from the icy weather. In these harsh times we follow Dylan, Constance and Stella as they try to survive the low temperatures and the lack of sunlight, as well as their own personal problems.
I met someone once who told me you can drink energy from the sun, store it in your cells so you grow strong. She said we should all do it. It’s like a back-up store of it in your cells; she said there were sunlight pilgrims doing it all the time – it’s how they get through the dark, by stashing up as much light as they can.
The Sunlight Pilgrims is the second book by author Jenni Fagan and it’s a slow book. This is a good thing because the calm pace makes you able to better enjoy the beautiful prose, the truly chilling descriptions of the ice and snow, and the bonds that Dylan, Constance and Stella develop with each other.
In a way this book reminded me of a book I read earlier this year (The Trees by Ali Shaw) because in both books a natural disaster forms the backdrop to the problems of the MC’s, which are the actual driving force of the story.
The strongest character in this book to me is Stella. She’s 12-year old, self-assured girl with a great sense of humour, but she’s also a male-to-female transgender. I’ve never read about a (young) trans-character before but I found the way Fagan described Stella and the struggle with her identity just beautiful and very realistic.
In the book Stella started her transition thirteen months ago and while her coming-out is met with disapproval from the community, her crush, and her own father, she keeps her head up. Fagan draws an interesting parallel between the upcoming winter and Stella’s body going through puberty: while the temperatures drop, Stella’s gender dysphoria increases.
She dries herself with a blue towel and looks in the mirror. She has no breasts. That’s okay. That’s fine. A beard is less good. A deep voice is a terrifying thought. Sometimes, in quiet moments like this, she has to fight not to hate her body for threatening her with a baritone. She won’t do that, though, she won’t let herself hate it, because her body is a good one. It is strong. A girl is a girl is a girl.
You can’t help but fall in love with Stella’s determination and grit. Her gender is an important part of her character but never the most defining one: Stella remains a 12-year old girl who worries about her crush and gets excited about the snow. She’s a transgender but she’s also a child, and I loved how her mother and Dylan realized this and supported her unconditionally.
Dylan...was okay. He is a newcomer to the Scottish town of Clachan Fells and moved there because both his beloved grandmother and mother passed away in the last 6 months, and he was forced to sell their family movie-theatre. Dylan therefore doesn’t only deal with grief and loss, but also with feelings of failure. He just doesn’t want to face those emotions, and so he spends the first 40% of the book befriending Stella and falling in love with her mother.
In the end I do think he’s an interesting MC and he’s definitely a good person, but I just hated how in the beginning Dylan’s moments of grief were overshadowed by his crush on Constance.
Constance though, I absolutely loved. The woman is independent, resourceful and tough as nails. She’s a survivalist and no matter how hard life has been to her, she’s willing to do everything to keep herself and her child safe. That vow has gotten harder since Stella’s transition, so Constance biggest concern in this book is, besides battling the cruel winter, to help and defend her daughter as best as she can. I was glad that Dylan became her ally in this, but the mother-daughter relationship between Constance and Stella was one of the best parts of this book.
Stella is like the wind outside and Constance is the fire. The wind is gentle, blowing lightly to brighten the flames, to stop the fire from going out.
Criticism: As my review shows, I found the characters stronger and more compelling than the story itself. Both are intriguing and the calm pace worked well in slowly revealing the depth of everyone’s problems, but it also ate away my reading-enthusiasm. Especially Dylan’s first chapters were a pain to read. I also disliked how the writer used m-dashes instead of quotation marks, so it wasn’t always clear who said what.
The ending of the book felt me feeling lost. I’ve liked to have a short epilogue to be certain of spring and a hope of a new start, because while I know everyone’s going to be okay, I’d have liked to be sure.
Overall, this book is about identity: who are we as a person, what is our place in our family, and on a broader level, who do you want to seem to be to the outside world?
It’s about trusting yourself and relying on others in dark times, and while the plot isn’t as strong, the prose and the characters definitely are. A perfect book for this fall/winter. 3,5 stars.
February 6, 2017
“...the child of a wolf may not feel like she has fangs until she finds herself facing the moon, but they are still there the whole time regardless.”
There is absolutely no question: the writing here is stunning. Stella is also a fantastic, engaging character - I just wish the others had the same depth. There's a little manic-pixie-dream syndrome going on here, along with a good solid case of insta-love, and on reflection I found I had very little attachment to either Dylan or Constance.
To be fair, we only ever see Constance through the eyes of those around her, while Stella and Dylan let us into their deepest thoughts - almost. There's always that hint of a wall up, barred against the reader and maybe even their own minds.
But oh the words are so gorgeous - a whole extra star simply for the images, the silent, frozen word Fagan conjures up, the stunning, haunting turns of phrase.
One last thing - and this is not related to the book so much as the reviews of it: an apocalypse is not automatically a dystopia, and vice versa. The Sunlight Pilgrims is set in an apocalyptic world (or on the edge of it), not a dystopian one. Google has some pretty succinct explanations of the differences here and yes I am indeed a petty grammar-freak, no apologies.
March 8, 2018
The ice age is coming,
the sun's zooming in,
meltdown expected,
the wheat is growing thin
Wind forward a few years to 2020. The ice caps are melting and the gulf stream has stopped. The UK is subject to a huge freeze as the Thames ices over and the country is carpeted in snow.
In the north of Scotland a community struggles to adapt and survive as the temperature plummets. In a trailer park on the edge of town a newcomer from London strikes up a relationship with his neighbours, a hippy lady and a trans almost teen. They seem easy to get on with, comfortable like family.
Past secrets gently unfold and the Londoner discovers that he has roots in the far north that he did not suspect. The circumstances of his arrival seem less random and more directed as he peels back layers of the past.
A quirky novel of wonderful characters, full of warmth and cheer in a bleak setting. Somehow Fagan has crafted a feel good end of the world story, subtle and rich, funny and sad, knowing and world weary.
The blurb mentions echoes of Proulx's The Shipping News and Ian Banks The Wasp Factory. I can see the parallels, and would rate this as highly as these books - an accolade as they are favourites of mine.
A good read, I would recommend it.
the sun's zooming in,
meltdown expected,
the wheat is growing thin
Wind forward a few years to 2020. The ice caps are melting and the gulf stream has stopped. The UK is subject to a huge freeze as the Thames ices over and the country is carpeted in snow.
In the north of Scotland a community struggles to adapt and survive as the temperature plummets. In a trailer park on the edge of town a newcomer from London strikes up a relationship with his neighbours, a hippy lady and a trans almost teen. They seem easy to get on with, comfortable like family.
Past secrets gently unfold and the Londoner discovers that he has roots in the far north that he did not suspect. The circumstances of his arrival seem less random and more directed as he peels back layers of the past.
A quirky novel of wonderful characters, full of warmth and cheer in a bleak setting. Somehow Fagan has crafted a feel good end of the world story, subtle and rich, funny and sad, knowing and world weary.
The blurb mentions echoes of Proulx's The Shipping News and Ian Banks The Wasp Factory. I can see the parallels, and would rate this as highly as these books - an accolade as they are favourites of mine.
A good read, I would recommend it.
January 27, 2019
Однажды романтически несобранный юноша, в которого я была по уши, безнадёжно влюблена, и его строгий приятель, влюблённый в меня, пригласили нас с подругой на загородную прогулку. Договаривались заранее, "после сессии", чтобы не завалить зарубежную литературу и теорграм. Всю сессию я сдавала с трепещущим сердцем, зачеркивала дни в календаре, зарубежная литература сдалась без боя, как во сне.
В назначенный день термометр за окном показывал -18. Я надела всю зимнюю одежду, которую могла найти, и две пары носков. Мы взяли с собой вино в термосе, которое уже в поезде превратилось в ледышки, и желающим его пришлось грызть. Ноги замёрзли минут через пять, я пыталась не заплакать, Он предложил согреть их руками, и все это было ужасно, ужасно неловко и грустно, но оставался хотя бы мизерный шанс не потерять лицо — пока я не захотела в туалет. Прогулка закончилась, мы ждали электричку, друзья светски обсуждали, насколько приемлемо писать в тамбуре, если уж совсем никак не дотерпеть.
Мне кажется, влюблённые и ошарашенные, способные в -38 встраивать вечеринки на крыше с просмотром северного сияния, это настоящие герои волшебных сказок. Я надеюсь, что у них хватит дров, консервов и тёплых носков. А джин, кажется, не замерзает так охотно, как вино.
В назначенный день термометр за окном показывал -18. Я надела всю зимнюю одежду, которую могла найти, и две пары носков. Мы взяли с собой вино в термосе, которое уже в поезде превратилось в ледышки, и желающим его пришлось грызть. Ноги замёрзли минут через пять, я пыталась не заплакать, Он предложил согреть их руками, и все это было ужасно, ужасно неловко и грустно, но оставался хотя бы мизерный шанс не потерять лицо — пока я не захотела в туалет. Прогулка закончилась, мы ждали электричку, друзья светски обсуждали, насколько приемлемо писать в тамбуре, если уж совсем никак не дотерпеть.
Мне кажется, влюблённые и ошарашенные, способные в -38 встраивать вечеринки на крыше с просмотром северного сияния, это настоящие герои волшебных сказок. Я надеюсь, что у них хватит дров, консервов и тёплых носков. А джин, кажется, не замерзает так охотно, как вино.
December 12, 2018
This is an apocalypse story that stars some really boring people; and a transgender teen. The most interesting part is not the apocalypse (which felt barely relevant half the time) but instead our teenager; who isn't even the main character of the story.
Plot
A mid-aged man learns that his family is in debt and after his mother and her partner die he is left with no choice but to flee the home he's always known; a one-screen cinema. He ends up in a little trailer in Northern Ireland in what is about to be another Earth Ice Age. There he meets a woman and her teenage daughter.
Sounds promising enough right? Unfortunately there is no real plot here except existing and even that plot is so thin it's barely there. For me it's not enough plot to just have your characters existing. Particularly when the conditions being described aren't even that bad at first.
Ice Age
First let me say, I live in Canada. Not in a warm part of Canada but on the cold open prairies of Alberta. I know cold and I know snow. Both have been a part of my life since the day I was born (in a blizzard in February). So when I read a book whose core plot is that Earth is devolving into an imminent Ice Age I know what is survivable and what is not. Unfortunately Jenni Fagan does not seem to have the same knowledge.
There are ridiculous situations described both where people live (and don't have frostbite) and where people die from the winter conditions. It's like the cold is no big deal when it's convenient (like our main characters are out in it); but as soon as someone else in the cold they are dead. Far too convenient and not consistent enough to be even close to the truth of what cold weather does to the human body.
Temperature
Speaking of it being cold, I am so confused by the units of measurement used in this book. It's written by a UK author so (as a Canadian) I am expecting to have temperatures in Celsius and distances in kilometers. And yet, I get miles per hour and temperatures with no measurement associated with them AT ALL! I read this entire book and still don't know if the temperatures in it are supposed to be Celsius or Fahrenheit!! This was beyond frustrating. Now by the end of the book at the -40 to -50 degree range it doesn't matter, as the two systems start to sync up momentarily, however that is not the point. If you are going to write a book where temperature is so important be sure to tell your reader the unit of measure please!
Transgender Teen
If not for our teen and her story I would have given up on this book before I finished it. This is a girl (who was a boy) whose finding it difficult to find friends or have connections with the majority of people in her life as they make fun of her (kids/teens) or still see her as a boy (adults). Even her own father doesn't use her female name! I felt that the discussion of our teen girl was relatively well done. It wasn't super in-depth and I didn't feel like I learned anything new about the types of emotions a transgender teen might go through. But at the very least she was interesting and a very likeable character. I wanted to be her friend; especially when no one else would be.
Overall
I was really disappointed by The Sunlight Pilgrims. It seems that books that focus on cold weather situations are just not up to the standard I expect. I'm not sure why it is so hard to research and understand the cold for most authors but lately it feels like there is some sort of 'cold education' that winter seasoned folks around the world have that others cannot understand.
Some good ideas were present; the characters core back stories were well represented (if not their emotions regarding their current state), the concept of an Ice Age and dwindling resources was fine but Fagan missed the boat (or iceberg if you will) for me. I wanted to feel afraid of the cold and I wanted to feel cold reading this book; but instead all I felt was indifference to 90% of the plot points, cold weather and characters portrayed.
For this and more of my reviews please visit my blog at: Epic Reading
Please note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an honest and unbiased review.
Plot
A mid-aged man learns that his family is in debt and after his mother and her partner die he is left with no choice but to flee the home he's always known; a one-screen cinema. He ends up in a little trailer in Northern Ireland in what is about to be another Earth Ice Age. There he meets a woman and her teenage daughter.
Sounds promising enough right? Unfortunately there is no real plot here except existing and even that plot is so thin it's barely there. For me it's not enough plot to just have your characters existing. Particularly when the conditions being described aren't even that bad at first.
Ice Age
First let me say, I live in Canada. Not in a warm part of Canada but on the cold open prairies of Alberta. I know cold and I know snow. Both have been a part of my life since the day I was born (in a blizzard in February). So when I read a book whose core plot is that Earth is devolving into an imminent Ice Age I know what is survivable and what is not. Unfortunately Jenni Fagan does not seem to have the same knowledge.
There are ridiculous situations described both where people live (and don't have frostbite) and where people die from the winter conditions. It's like the cold is no big deal when it's convenient (like our main characters are out in it); but as soon as someone else in the cold they are dead. Far too convenient and not consistent enough to be even close to the truth of what cold weather does to the human body.
Temperature
Speaking of it being cold, I am so confused by the units of measurement used in this book. It's written by a UK author so (as a Canadian) I am expecting to have temperatures in Celsius and distances in kilometers. And yet, I get miles per hour and temperatures with no measurement associated with them AT ALL! I read this entire book and still don't know if the temperatures in it are supposed to be Celsius or Fahrenheit!! This was beyond frustrating. Now by the end of the book at the -40 to -50 degree range it doesn't matter, as the two systems start to sync up momentarily, however that is not the point. If you are going to write a book where temperature is so important be sure to tell your reader the unit of measure please!
Transgender Teen
If not for our teen and her story I would have given up on this book before I finished it. This is a girl (who was a boy) whose finding it difficult to find friends or have connections with the majority of people in her life as they make fun of her (kids/teens) or still see her as a boy (adults). Even her own father doesn't use her female name! I felt that the discussion of our teen girl was relatively well done. It wasn't super in-depth and I didn't feel like I learned anything new about the types of emotions a transgender teen might go through. But at the very least she was interesting and a very likeable character. I wanted to be her friend; especially when no one else would be.
Overall
I was really disappointed by The Sunlight Pilgrims. It seems that books that focus on cold weather situations are just not up to the standard I expect. I'm not sure why it is so hard to research and understand the cold for most authors but lately it feels like there is some sort of 'cold education' that winter seasoned folks around the world have that others cannot understand.
Some good ideas were present; the characters core back stories were well represented (if not their emotions regarding their current state), the concept of an Ice Age and dwindling resources was fine but Fagan missed the boat (or iceberg if you will) for me. I wanted to feel afraid of the cold and I wanted to feel cold reading this book; but instead all I felt was indifference to 90% of the plot points, cold weather and characters portrayed.
For this and more of my reviews please visit my blog at: Epic Reading
Please note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an honest and unbiased review.
November 28, 2016
The Sunlight Pilgrims, by Jenni Fagan, takes place in 2020 in a small Scottish town during the worst winter on record (the approaching ice age).
It is a touchingly believable story of a small group of people, living in a caravan, and how they continue to lead their lives while the enviromental catastrophe escalates.
I couldn't help liking the characters as they were flawed and genuine. While fighting off despair they hung onto each other with dignity and affection.
One of the strongest aspects of the story would be "Stella's" struggle to be accepted as a transgender teen by her community.
I thoroughly enjoyed this highly imaginative, well-written novel.
Thank you to Crown Publishing and NetGalley for an arc of this novel in exchange for my honest review.
It is a touchingly believable story of a small group of people, living in a caravan, and how they continue to lead their lives while the enviromental catastrophe escalates.
I couldn't help liking the characters as they were flawed and genuine. While fighting off despair they hung onto each other with dignity and affection.
One of the strongest aspects of the story would be "Stella's" struggle to be accepted as a transgender teen by her community.
I thoroughly enjoyed this highly imaginative, well-written novel.
Thank you to Crown Publishing and NetGalley for an arc of this novel in exchange for my honest review.
June 9, 2016
"You can drink light right down into your chromosomes, then in the darkest minutes of winter, when there is a total absence of it, you will glow and glow and glow."
This is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. I felt the story was slightly prolonged in the central section but the overall lyrical beauty of it led this to be a solid 4/5 star read. It also dealt with a multitude of important topics such as grief, gender identity, sexuality, the degradation of women, monogamy, transgender identity and transformation, societal shaming and bullying. I can see this becoming one of the most important new releases of the year. New favourite author ❤
This is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. I felt the story was slightly prolonged in the central section but the overall lyrical beauty of it led this to be a solid 4/5 star read. It also dealt with a multitude of important topics such as grief, gender identity, sexuality, the degradation of women, monogamy, transgender identity and transformation, societal shaming and bullying. I can see this becoming one of the most important new releases of the year. New favourite author ❤
May 24, 2016
The winter of 2015-16 was one of the warmest winters on record. Fast forward to 2020. In the Sunlight Pilgrims, climate change causes the coast of Scotland to experience a rapid drop in temperature from -6 degrees in November 2020 to -56 degrees in March 2021. The polar icecaps are melting. The coastal village of Clachan Fells is one of many places where residents will be snowed in, light deprived, and experience severe cabin fever. Even worse, some residents could freeze to death. This could be the end times.
Constance Fairbairn lives in a caravan park with her transgender daughter Stella. Living on the fringe of society, Constance keeps them fed and clothed by refinishing and reselling items retrieved from the dumps. Constance is a fierce supporter of Stella's choices and supports her attempts to obtain hormone-blockers. An incomer to the caravan park, Dylan MacRae befriends both mother and daughter when he comes to occupy the caravan next door.
While the temperature plummets each central character confronts his personal issues. Constance is torn between two lovers. One is her former husband Alistair. Alistair, Stella's dad as well as town residents taunt Stella about her new gender identity. Dylan has moved into the caravan at Clachan Fells on a temporary basis. He is bereaving the deaths of his mother and grandmother as well as the closure of the small art cinema founded by his grandmother. The relationship between Constance and Dylan heats up as the temperature drops.
Jenni Fagan has written a very timely apocalyptic novel. Climate change is a hot button topic seemingly overwhelming and fascinating, depressing and challenging. Fagan has done a stellar job in describing the potential collapse of society as polar icebergs threaten the Scottish coast and the survival of the world at large. A well crafted novel.
Thank you Reading Room and Penguin Random House for the opportunity to review this tome.
Constance Fairbairn lives in a caravan park with her transgender daughter Stella. Living on the fringe of society, Constance keeps them fed and clothed by refinishing and reselling items retrieved from the dumps. Constance is a fierce supporter of Stella's choices and supports her attempts to obtain hormone-blockers. An incomer to the caravan park, Dylan MacRae befriends both mother and daughter when he comes to occupy the caravan next door.
While the temperature plummets each central character confronts his personal issues. Constance is torn between two lovers. One is her former husband Alistair. Alistair, Stella's dad as well as town residents taunt Stella about her new gender identity. Dylan has moved into the caravan at Clachan Fells on a temporary basis. He is bereaving the deaths of his mother and grandmother as well as the closure of the small art cinema founded by his grandmother. The relationship between Constance and Dylan heats up as the temperature drops.
Jenni Fagan has written a very timely apocalyptic novel. Climate change is a hot button topic seemingly overwhelming and fascinating, depressing and challenging. Fagan has done a stellar job in describing the potential collapse of society as polar icebergs threaten the Scottish coast and the survival of the world at large. A well crafted novel.
Thank you Reading Room and Penguin Random House for the opportunity to review this tome.
August 12, 2016
Baby it's cold outside! The year is 2020 and it's -6 degrees in Scotland. Temperatures all over the world are dropping to record lows, it's snowing in places it shouldn't be snowing and the Thames has frozen over. Are you cold yet? Oh yeah and a major iceberg is headed towards Scotland. Things are not looking so great for Constance and her trans teenage daughter Stella who is struggling to get hormone blockers.
This is a very literary take on the genre along the lines of Station Eleven or Gold Fame Citrus. If you enjoyed those you will like this.
The science doesn't always add up or make sense but I was so engaged with Stella and her plight that I didn't care.
Really enjoyed this one.
This is a very literary take on the genre along the lines of Station Eleven or Gold Fame Citrus. If you enjoyed those you will like this.
The science doesn't always add up or make sense but I was so engaged with Stella and her plight that I didn't care.
Really enjoyed this one.
June 27, 2018
I just fell in love with all the characters and the place. This made me laugh, it made me sad, it made me happy. I am not sure what else to say. It is a story about an ice age? Well, yes, but it is more than that. Far more. Everyone was suffering from a degree of sadness, but as things got colder, they became happier. Funny how things like that happen. I found myself wanting to live in northern Scotland and watch an iceberg come into the bay. I am going to live with Dylan, Stella , Constance, Vivienne and Gunn for awhile, they hold a special place in my heart.
06/26/18 My second reading. I loved it even more. It is everything I said in my first review and more. I love when it when you find the deeper layers of things. I simply recommend this story!
06/26/18 My second reading. I loved it even more. It is everything I said in my first review and more. I love when it when you find the deeper layers of things. I simply recommend this story!
February 14, 2017
How do you rate a book like this? I don't even know where to start or what to say here.
Let's get something straight first, this is more of a character driven book showcasing people who are lost, who are struggling with grief and looking for acceptance, rather than a book about the end of the world.
It's bleak, slightly depressing, slow and not a great deal happens BUT it is written so well. It's clever, a bit dry (which a lot of people that aren't from England may not understand), full of quirky characters and vivid descriptions.
So, despite the fact that I don't like the end and could do with a large alcoholic drink (or ten) and will need to watch about a thousand cute cat videos to cheer myself back up, I can't warrant rating this below a 4.
September 3, 2016
giving away a copy on my blog https://www.facebook.com/suzyapproved...#
June 7, 2023
mid & the author isn’t trans.
September 13, 2016
In the vein of Station Eleven, Jenni Fagan pens a gentler, poetic, and profound "snowpocalypse" tale. Despite my increasing wariness for dystopian tales, this one manages to feel quite fresh. The world is undergoing something of an icy Pompeii, and it's progressing more quickly than any scientists foresaw coming. It's snowing mostly everywhere, temperatures won't stop plummeting to alarming depths, and civilization is running out of places to outrun it.
Dylan MacRae, a loner who worked at his family's Soho movie theatre, leaves it behind for for the Scottish highlands, carrying the ashes of his grandmother and mother. Dylan has always lived life on the fringe - he's taller than everyone else and there's some talk he's descended from "giants," he doesn't easily connect with others, he's never really been in love. All that changes when he arrives at the caravan his mother left him, and meets Constance and Stella. His first glimpse of a sleepwalking Constance has her "polishing the moon" outside her trailer, and he's immediately besotted.
Constance is mother to Stella, a young trans teenager who has several battles to fight here. Her peers of this small community knew her first as a young boy, and it's difficult for them to accept this "new" Stella, who she feels she has been all along. She's been both physically and emotionally tortured, and it continues throughout the book as she struggles for acceptance - and the right to be herself and obtain hormone blockers when doctors disdainfully feel there are more pressing priorities in the face of this new frozen frontier - but she's a fighter. Stella is a wonderful character, a natural leader, a glue between the disparate and panicky adults here.
The changing atmosphere is so key here that the ominous icy weather feels like another character in itself. Fagan's descriptions of the pervasive snow and cold are so vivid that it's easy to envision a world both gently and fiercely blanketed, unusual groups of individuals bonding together desperate to kindle any modicum of warmth.
One star docked because that conclusion was incredibly dissatisfying, even if this is an almost perfect book otherwise.
Dylan MacRae, a loner who worked at his family's Soho movie theatre, leaves it behind for for the Scottish highlands, carrying the ashes of his grandmother and mother. Dylan has always lived life on the fringe - he's taller than everyone else and there's some talk he's descended from "giants," he doesn't easily connect with others, he's never really been in love. All that changes when he arrives at the caravan his mother left him, and meets Constance and Stella. His first glimpse of a sleepwalking Constance has her "polishing the moon" outside her trailer, and he's immediately besotted.
Constance is mother to Stella, a young trans teenager who has several battles to fight here. Her peers of this small community knew her first as a young boy, and it's difficult for them to accept this "new" Stella, who she feels she has been all along. She's been both physically and emotionally tortured, and it continues throughout the book as she struggles for acceptance - and the right to be herself and obtain hormone blockers when doctors disdainfully feel there are more pressing priorities in the face of this new frozen frontier - but she's a fighter. Stella is a wonderful character, a natural leader, a glue between the disparate and panicky adults here.
The changing atmosphere is so key here that the ominous icy weather feels like another character in itself. Fagan's descriptions of the pervasive snow and cold are so vivid that it's easy to envision a world both gently and fiercely blanketed, unusual groups of individuals bonding together desperate to kindle any modicum of warmth.
One star docked because that conclusion was incredibly dissatisfying, even if this is an almost perfect book otherwise.
January 30, 2019
I'm torn on how to review this novel. I recognize the writing as unique and I feel that Fagan was trying for something new, and taking chances, which are always things to be applauded. And it also feels to me as if many people will enjoy this book--possibly fans of Neil Stephenson and William Gibson--even though I didn't enjoy it myself. For me the story felt underdeveloped, and the syntax felt a little unmoored from any concrete idea I could make for myself about what it meant. There are too many themes and characters packed in. I didn't feel invested in any of them. I had trouble following events. It felt like there were too many themes going on at once and too many sharp scene cuts to ever really believe I was being taken care of as a reader. In sum I just wasn't the right reader to catch what was being offered here.
June 27, 2016
Not for me.
I am so sad that this book flopped for me. I really wanted to like it... I do love dystopian reads, but I felt so confused by most of it.
So much detail, and yet I often felt like the pieces went nowhere. I was waiting for the moment when I would be like, okay, wow, but it didn't come. I was confused by Dylan and Constance more than anyone in the book and I thought it was supposed to be centered around Stella.
Was I not supposed to get it? Did I miss something?
I don't know.
Yup, this book just was not for me. But like so many other books that I didn't like and the rest of the world loved, don't knock it till you try it.
I am so sad that this book flopped for me. I really wanted to like it... I do love dystopian reads, but I felt so confused by most of it.
So much detail, and yet I often felt like the pieces went nowhere. I was waiting for the moment when I would be like, okay, wow, but it didn't come. I was confused by Dylan and Constance more than anyone in the book and I thought it was supposed to be centered around Stella.
Was I not supposed to get it? Did I miss something?
I don't know.
Yup, this book just was not for me. But like so many other books that I didn't like and the rest of the world loved, don't knock it till you try it.
March 22, 2021
Jenni Fagan is a local Edinburgh author and her novels intrigued me, so I asked a friend to get me one for my birthday. The friend chose 'The Sunlight Pilgrims', published in 2016 and chronicling a catastrophe in 2020. Rather than a plague, though, it's a new ice age triggered by climate change disrupting the Gulf Stream. Given my love of snow and attachment to the stupid film The Day After Tomorrow, I adored the icy world Fagan evokes. It is both vivid and visceral, including some gorgeous arctic details of sundogs and icebergs. The plot and character focus suggest a 'cosy catastrophe' type of novel, although I'm not sure how apposite that term is anymore. We in the wealthy West are living in a cosy catastrophe world, worrying about how much longer the cosy part can last. Anyway, 'The Sunlight Pilgrims' is set in a caravan site in the Highlands of Scotland. A man named Dylan heads up there from London after the death of his mother and is drawn to his new neighbours, a woman named Constance and her teenage daughter Stella. Of the three, I found Stella the most interesting and appealing character. She is given plenty of space in the narrative; a good choice given that Dylan's attraction to Constance is pretty mundane. Stella is trans and her dysphoria is treated thoughtfully, as significant to her life but by no means her only trait.
As the winter gets colder, life in the caravan site becomes more dangerous. Yet this is not a survivalist story in tone; there isn't a consistent feeling of danger. Instead there is a sense of community, albeit not without disagreements and intolerance. I enjoyed details like a trip to IKEA for warmth and food, as well as the ingenious DIY required to keep caravans warm in an ice age. The focus remains upon on the emotional experience of Stella, Constance, and Dylan. They adapt to the extreme conditions, which seems more plausible now than it would have done had I read this before 2020. Being stuck indoors all the time as it is dangerous outside has become familiar. Dylan's discoveries about his family didn't have a great impact for me, though. The dynamics between the three main characters were great, though, and the scattering of spooky moments well-judged. I enjoyed following daily life as the temperature dropped. The ending was, as so often in literary novels, fairly abrupt and inconclusive. The snowy imagery was wonderful, though, and I definitely want to read more of Fagan's work.
As the winter gets colder, life in the caravan site becomes more dangerous. Yet this is not a survivalist story in tone; there isn't a consistent feeling of danger. Instead there is a sense of community, albeit not without disagreements and intolerance. I enjoyed details like a trip to IKEA for warmth and food, as well as the ingenious DIY required to keep caravans warm in an ice age. The focus remains upon on the emotional experience of Stella, Constance, and Dylan. They adapt to the extreme conditions, which seems more plausible now than it would have done had I read this before 2020. Being stuck indoors all the time as it is dangerous outside has become familiar. Dylan's discoveries about his family didn't have a great impact for me, though. The dynamics between the three main characters were great, though, and the scattering of spooky moments well-judged. I enjoyed following daily life as the temperature dropped. The ending was, as so often in literary novels, fairly abrupt and inconclusive. The snowy imagery was wonderful, though, and I definitely want to read more of Fagan's work.
October 26, 2020
“There are three suns in the sky and it is the last day of autumn—perhaps forever. Sun dogs. Phantom suns. Parhelia. They mark the arrival of the most extreme winter for 200 years. Roads jam with people trying to stock up on fuel, food, water. Some say it is the end of times. Polar caps are melting. Salinity in the ocean is at an all-time low. The North Atlantic Drift is slowing.” – Jenni Fagan, The Sunlight Pilgrims
Climate fiction set in the near future as the world experiences extreme cold caused by the follow-on effects of melting ice caps. Dylan, whose mother and grandmother have recently died, abandons London, and moves to a caravan in Clachan Fells in the Scottish Highlands. Constance and her twelve-year-old trans daughter, Stella, are living in the caravan (that appears to be a mobile home community). They befriend Dylan and he joins the small group struggling to survive the elements.
I found this book a creative take on apocalyptic fiction. The author beautifully describes the wintery landscape. I liked the quirky characters and non-traditional family. I appreciated the portrayal of the trans individual, conveying a sense of the loneliness, emotions, and bullying she experiences.
The author goes a bit overboard with the crude language. The reasons behind the increasing cold are not addressed in any depth. I am not sure what to think about the ending. I do not generally mind open endings, but the way I interpreted it was not particularly satisfying.
Climate fiction set in the near future as the world experiences extreme cold caused by the follow-on effects of melting ice caps. Dylan, whose mother and grandmother have recently died, abandons London, and moves to a caravan in Clachan Fells in the Scottish Highlands. Constance and her twelve-year-old trans daughter, Stella, are living in the caravan (that appears to be a mobile home community). They befriend Dylan and he joins the small group struggling to survive the elements.
I found this book a creative take on apocalyptic fiction. The author beautifully describes the wintery landscape. I liked the quirky characters and non-traditional family. I appreciated the portrayal of the trans individual, conveying a sense of the loneliness, emotions, and bullying she experiences.
The author goes a bit overboard with the crude language. The reasons behind the increasing cold are not addressed in any depth. I am not sure what to think about the ending. I do not generally mind open endings, but the way I interpreted it was not particularly satisfying.
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