It’s the end of the world as they know it.

My friend hosted a literary potluck last month: bring a book to share, and the book should be something you think everyone should read. The prompt was intentionally vague and meant to inspire us to bring a book that was personally meaningful and we wanted to evangelize.

I took home the host’s recommendation: The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton, her second novel, published in 2022.

Brooks-Dalton writes in a growing genre of dystopian fiction where the characters are navigating the now and a near-future riddled with climate disasters that closely mirror our present day. The dystopia mirrors the worlds we experienced in Ling Ma’s Severance or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road - abandoned big box stores, characters nervously emerging onto previously-common thoroughfares to scavenge for their necessities.

The Light Pirate takes us through three times: past, present, future, with the book divided into four parts (power, water, light, time). An epigraph by the weather itself introduces each section.

The plot blends magical realism with a classic mother-daughter arc. We open with Frida, a pregnant newlywed who’s life has transformed rapidly. After an itinerant childhood, growing up on her mother’s boat, she abandoned a graduate program in architecture after a family visit collided with a traumatic storm. That storm, named Poppy, destroyed Puerto Rico. Frida meets her lineman husband Kirby as she mourns her mother and survives in a shelter for Poppy’s survivors.

A whirlwind romance and an unexpected pregnancy take Frida from carefree co-ed to a pregnant stepmom ( with “two little boys who hate her”, which is a real kicker to read) in Kirby’s run-down Florida town. Like the lightning in Florida’s hot humidity, tragedy continues to strike and by the end of the book’s first part, Frida dies following childbirth during a storm that also claims Kirby’s youngest son, Flip.

The story then shifts to Wanda, named for the hurricane that accompanied her birth. She grows up as Florida’s infrastructure gradually collapses around her. Storms become perpetual, neighbors migrate north, public services disappear, and the federal government eventually abandons the state entirely.

Rather than following a traditional apocalypse plot, the novel traces Wanda’s adaptation to a world that is becoming stranger, emptier, and more dangerous. Power goes out more frequently; storms are more intense and more common. Hurricane season is perennial. Neighbors migrate northward as the federal government begins pulling out of towns and cities.

To Wanda, this is the only world she’s ever known and she has a connection with the water that draws and pulls her in explicable ways. Her mentor, survivalist Phyllis, tries to explain the starry constellation of light that blooms when Wanda touches the water, but it defies scientific rationale.

The collapse of Florida’s infrastructure happens gradually and then suddenly. Bankruptcy eliminates all civil jobs and the lack of local maintenance causes a destructive flood, sweeping away Wanda’s father. The stores are gone, the bank is gone. The mail ends. Eventually, the government abandons Florida entirely and Wanda and her mentor elect to stay, choosing to fend for themselves in an increasingly inhospitable and violent environment.

The Light Pirate is less plot-driven and more of a meditation on survival.

It’s tender and atmospheric, and a wonderful portrayal on how a society collapses.

But I struggled with the novel’s uneven characterization: Frida, who occupies only its opening section, felt more vivid and compelling to me than Wanda, the protagonist whose entire life forms the heart of the book. Throughout, there’s just too much suspension of belief and shrugging “it’s fiction!” that you need to move through this novel.

Wanda, as a protagonist, is a passive vehicle for light and nature. She reacts and ponders but isn’t prone to deep introspection or curiosity outside of scientific exploration. I hoped for more of an adventurer or innovator, or more of a quest to understand why she is the conduit for this magical, natural light: that isn’t Wanda. She exists and survives, and thinks in terms of survival. She’s far more opaque than Frida, and it’s harder to rally around Wanda’s survival.

When I finished Frida’s section, I had to a break from The Light Pirate because her grotesque and pointless death was so disturbing.

Frida is heavily pregnant and wants to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Wanda; she barely recalls how she survived Hurricane Poppy, which killed her mother. Her husband dismisses her concerns and argues with her, leaving her alone with the two boys while he goes to work.

He regrets that choice for the rest of his life.

Frida’s section covers less than one day in their lives, but we get to know the character intimately; how she loved her unusual childhood learning from her mother’s vast skills at sea, how a glimpse at the Bridge of the Americas sparked an immediate vision of her future vocation (she wanted to build the bridges and skyscrapers and structures that defined landscapes). How she loved to cook, but making unwelcome meals for her new stepchildren filled her with dread and anxiety. Her yearning to return to her old life in Texas paired with her hopes for the new baby. She casually wonders about taking her husband’s truck and driving north, fleeing the zone of uncertainty, but takes no action.

Frida dies, bleeding and laboring alone, on the kitchen floor. Her final breath names her daughter Wanda after the storm battling her family.

As the storm grows, the two little boys sneak away from Frida to play. The younger boy, Flip, anxiously follows his big brother’s directions while urging them to head home and seek safety. He dies, carried off by the hurricane’s raging winds, thrown into a cypress tree, when the brothers are desperately seeking shelter.

Frida receives no afterlife in the narrative. Wanda knows almost nothing about her mother or heritage, Kirby occasionally reflects on how he ignored his wife’s wishes to evacuate, and Frida is gradually reduced to a crate of belongings and a battered Jolly Roger flag. For a character rendered with such intimacy, that disappearance feels especially abrupt.

The banality of Kirby’s dismissiveness towards Frida - which killed her - deeply bothered me. She’s at least 35 weeks pregnant and they met in a post-hurricane shelter after her mother was killed by the storm. Frida describes her mother’s approach to storms; they would dock their houseboat in the safest nearby harbor, then seek out a cheap motel to wait out a storm. This is the same woman who, less than a year later, is content to stay on the coast during a Cat 4?

The other losses throughout the book struck me as poignant and meaningful for the narrative.

Wanda kills to defend herself and Phyllis; Kirby is lost to the ravages of a flash flood. Phyllis is gradually lost to dementia, showing that we cannot prepare for everything. Wanda trains her entire life to survive as herself with nature…but is it worth it? Is that a life worth living?

The Light Pirate is beautiful, tender, and haunting. The gradual depiction of climate collapse feels more plausible than the spectacular devastation in films like The Day After Tomorrow. I only wish the book had given Wanda more interiority, Frida more enduring presence, and its final section a little more room to breathe. I admired the novel more than I loved it, but there is plenty here worth admiring.

Will I like The Light Pirate?

If you like character-driven stories and descriptive, evocative stories about nature, yes. If you like dystopia and catastrophes in fiction, yes. If you like a linear plot with resolutions and a more beginning, middle, end with a main plot and a subplot, then this probably isn’t a great book for you.

Will I guess the mystery/plot twist/big reveal?

Yes, I think you will. It’s a subtle twist but astute readers will catch on to the characters and motivations, instead of a big dramatic reveal.

If I liked Book ____, will I like The Light Pirate?

If you liked Wild Dark Shores or Migrations, I think you’d enjoy The Light Pirate. If you primarily love Station Eleven or more dystopic stories, probably not. Severance - yes, I think you’ll like it. If you’re more of a Cormac McCarthy adherent, I doubt the purple prose will resonate. Readers of Where the Crawdads Sing will like the coming of age narrative and Wanda’s resolute, independent life in the Florida wilds.