A girl who sees her ruined universe through the eyes of a normal, everyday child born into it, who has known nothing else, and so finds beauty wherever she looks. No, the good humor and cheer of The Past Is Red comes not from plucky, down-on-its-luck humanity as a whole, but from Tetley Abednego herself, the most hated, and beloved, girl in Garbagetown. Not because we deserve a cozy It Gets Better fable of the endurance of the human spirit because we definitely don’t.īecause humans can love anything, even the end of us. Not because humanity bands together to find some magical way to restore what our selfishness and short-sighted stubbornness destroyed-because, let’s be honest, the last year has shown us in living color how truly fantastical that idea always was. The Past Is Red is the most cheerful nightmarish climate change dystopia you’re likely to find on the shelves. Desperately, joyfully, with a powerful determination to protect it from itself. She is an exile, a romantic, a scavenger-and a criminal, abused by her fellow survivors at will in payment for a terrible, unfixable crime.Īnd Tetley loves her life.

A girl named Tetley grows up on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, picking through the literal wreckage of our culture as the trash heap drifts across the planet, grown as vast and peopled as a continent. Wonderful Trash: Tetley Abednego and The Past Is Red

Come along in her Big Idea as she tells you all about Garbagetown, the not-so-trashy setting for her newest novel, The Past Is Red. Valente has it, it’s more accurate to say that the world that people live in is actual garbage.

The past is red by catherynne m valente