Gold Fame Citrus

Gold Fame Citrus is the future California (well, the Southwest in general) we all figure will come to be some day.  It's also the California a few (million?) 'love to hate it' people secretly wish for.  In its 'dystopian-ness', it might seem like just another well-written book about society after the accumulated effects of our avarice and consumption of every possible resource.

But Claire Vaye Watkins has done something 'more' with the apocalypse.  She has mined California's long-running love affair with cults and religious leaders to show us what California might be after the dust of modern civilisation settles.  We see the desperate willingness of some to believe in the false promises of others and their willingness to destroy those who stubbornly refuse to be absorbed into their world view.  It's compelling because she makes it seem somehow plausible and alluring that California will eventually revert to being, not the land of Hollywood and tech, but the realm of the misfits and the fringe.

It doesn't have the all-encompassing feeling of an entirely new world the way Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy does.  Instead it's a bit more rooted in the here and just a little bit later than now of a world we know, much like Walking Dead (but without the zombies).  Her characters, Luz and Ray, are beautiful in their loving dissimilarity.

It's not a middle school book (for the sex and a bit of language), but it would make a great IB or AP English novel.  It's fodder for imagining what we create out of our own fall.