Review of “Trashlands” by Alison Stine

This is a post-apocalypse book about people who are living lives not that different from poor people anywhere. They dig through trash looking for something to sell, except the only thing they seem to find is plastic. That is the premise that requires the reader to suspend disbelief. They live in old cars but don’t collect metals. Their world is filled with plastic, periodically replenished by floods that bring this bounty from undisclosed locations. The world is covered in plastic. The central character’s son was even kidnapped and forced to work in a factory sorting plastic and making plastic bricks. For some reason, it cheaper and easier to make bricks from recycled plastic than the way people have been making them for thousands of years.

It sounds like centuries after the collapse of modern civilization, right? Nope. Many of the older people were alive shortly after the apocalypse, so it’s been maybe fifty years since the collapse; but no one seems to recall what happened or at least they aren’t sharing it with the reader. However, the cataclysm seemed to involve fire, flood, earthquakes — but no nukes. Oh and plastic. The author really has a fixation with plastic, which I can understand, but the story fails to explain why it is the only material of interest.

The writing style is typical for post-apocalyptic authors these days: short sentences with questionable grammar and mostly simple nouns and adjectives; however, the characters seem to know more than they profess to know repeatedly. (It is hard to keep an ensemble cast in line.)

As with so many novels I’ve reviewed, the writing deteriorated after the half-way point, finishing as if the author realized she wasn’t writing War and Peace. In other words, there isn’t much of a plot the way it is written; the elements are all there but they don’t come together to form a cogent story. I found myself dreading my daily reading most days, although there were a few good points.

In my opinion (humble and semiliterate), the author’s fascination with plastic ruined the story. She spends too much time telling the reader how much plastic there is in Scrappalachia, and how hard life is for the people who live there, told from every character’s perspective (they’re all the same), and not enough telling the story described on the back cover.

Her dream fizzles along with everything else. To give the author the benefit of the doubt, maybe that’s the point — there is no escaping destiny.

Perhaps American writers have become as cynical as nineteenth century Russian authors …