Review: The Weight of a Thousand Oceans
Reviewed by: Aquila
Author:
Jillian Webster
Publisher:
Jillian Webster
ISBN:
9780473525996
Date Published:
13 July 2021
Pages:
384
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$33.00
Jillian Webster’s Forgotten Ones trilogy is the story of Maia, a young woman travelling from the scattered islands that used to be Aotearoa to a thriving community rumoured to exist somewhere in the Arctic Circle.
Raised by her grandfather on one of the islands that rising sea levels have split the South Island into, Maia is aware that the options for her future are limited. There is no real community among the scattered denizens of the south and she fears she will end up little more than a broodmare for the old men who control the people of the northern islands. Instead she becomes determined to travel to the Arctic Circle settlement that her parents once intended to join, though she has no way to ascertain if it still exists.
Unfortunately The Weight of a Thousand Oceans suffers from not being sure which genre it wants to be. Maia comes across as a typical young adult heroine; impetuous and certain of things she cannot know which will later be proven correct. We know, for example, that she is special because she has odd coloured eyes and porcelain skin. She also has dreams that hint at a special destiny and powers. However the story moves too slowly for YA, instead hovering somewhere between cli-fi science fiction and paranormal romance.
Too much time - 20 chapters - is spent in establishing the home that Maia will leave: the bush and drowned coastal towns she hunts, fishes and scavenges in, the self-sufficient cabin with its library and greenhouse and the grandfather who likes to lecture her about the hubris of humankind and the interconnectedness of nature and god. I feel the book would flow better if it had started with her about to embark ship and details of backstory were given as contrast to her life onboard.
The story really gets going as it becomes a survival narrative. Maia and her love interest Lucas find themselves trapped in a uniquely post-apocalyptic quagmire and must use their skills and ingenuity to both survive and craft an escape. It would give too much away to say more but it is here that the author’s research is put to good use.
Reading the book’s blurb, I wondered if it was an inverted homage to John Wyndham’s classic tale The Chrysalids of young people with psychic powers in a post nuclear world who escape from Labrador to “Sealand” in the southern seas, but I am not convinced the similarities are intentional. Maybe the grass is just greener at the other end of the world, certainly the melting polar regions are popular destinations in post-apocalyptic fiction, whether Antarctica in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book of the same name and New Zealand author Jeff Murray’s The Melt, or the Arctic in books like Kassandra Montag’s After the Flood and Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning Midnight, recently filmed as Midnight Sky.
While Maia’s belief in her nebulous destination is borne out, by the end of the book she is only halfway there and headed in the wrong direction. There will be two more books to complete her odyssey. If you have not read anything set in a post climate change world, you like survival stories and are looking for a series with a hero coming into her powers give The Weight of a Thousand Oceans a try.
Reviewed by Aquila
