The City Beneath the Snow
Stories
The Alaska Literary Series
“If you love the world, if you fear for its future, you must read Bloom Again. Its beautifully told story lifted me, inspired me, moved me to tears, and gave me ideas, energy, determination, and—yes, I’ll say it—hope.”
—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising
"Marybeth Holleman’s novel ventures vividly and tenderly into beautiful and despairing ecosystems where life yet teeters on. Reminiscent, in warmth and charm, of novels by Ali Smith and Ann Patchett, Bloom Again asks the toughest possible questions. Are we asking the wrong questions about climate collapse? With extinction glaring us in the face, dare we hope for anything from life?"
—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of A Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl
“A feminist fictional account of current climate science, Bloom Again is an important book that marvelously captures the current science of climate change. It’s appeal is both timely and lasting.”
—Martha Amore, author of In the Quiet Season and Other Stories
“Overwhelmingly compelling, beautifully crafted with lyrical descriptions.”
—Mei Mei Evans, author of Oil and Water
Elyse is an empty-nest mother and artist in Alaska, and Astrid is a paleobotany professor in North Carolina. When the seemingly fulfilling lives of these distanced childhood friends are shaken, everything they’ve carefully established—from friends to careers to marriages—shifts, slips, unravels. This outer unraveling mirrors a growing discomfort with their safe lives. For Elyse, it begins with a mundane moment at the grocery store and a news story about polar bears. For Astrid, it happens during a faculty reception where a visiting lecturer’s talk sparks a rift with her mentor and father figure.
As the ground beneath them stirs, both women begin to recall their shared childhoods. Each must ignore the rumblings and fight for their comfortable existence—or leap. Before long, Elyse is following a Yup’ik marine mammal hunter along the windswept Siberian coast, and Astrid is risking her entire career to plant trees in India. As they navigate upheaval, they also confront the reminders of their past—a past whose full truth carries in it the promise of their future.
Bloom Again weaves together sophisticated narrative and characters, evocative travel and nature writing, and effective and reliable depictions of the climate change crises in parts of the world underrepresented in mainstream literary fiction. A realistic work of ecoclimate fiction, it considers how people confront and respond to an amorphous yet unavoidable event like climate change in their everyday lives, as well as how women find new inspiration in their “second spring”—a time in life when career and family needs are fulfilled. It’s a book about waking up and finding our way, together.
