Unless, on “One Friday in April” by Donald Antrim, everything changes. Yesterday, last week, tomorrow: all the same and that’s usually rather comforting. Have breakfast, brush teeth, same clothing, same routine, nothing new or remarkable or different. You got up at basically the same time you do every morning. More: Bookworm: Scare up some good reads for kids “One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival” If you love good future fiction, you gotta read it. It’s a book to share with someone, quick, so you can discuss. “Trashlands” isn’t exactly sci-fi, but just to the left of it and one step up. Have fun thinking you know how this book ends but forget it, you don’t. The prose feels sandy, but not pleasantly so. Start it, and you can smell the tale from your reading spot. The story isn’t really even dystopian it’s more futuristic, set in a possible someday time when society is almost entirely feral and the gulf between has and has nothing is as wide as an ocean full of plastic garbage. Not in a jump-out-and-boo! sort of way, either: author Alison Stine maintains eerie calm and quiet here, with just enough blanks left unfilled to leave readers feeling the cringey kind of unease that happens when you’re anticipating something bad and oops, it’s tomorrow. So, you’re kind of concerned about climate change? Then take this warning and buckle your belt tight, because “Trashlands” is about to scare the pants off you. He was the reason she stayed at Trashlands. She often wondered what he’d be like now back then, when he lived with her and Trillium, the boy was angry and dangerous and she still wanted him back. Coral thought he’d still be at a factory, but which one was anyone’s guess. Shanghai was small when he was snatched, and that was the point: children’s hands were more adept at sorting plastic. She needed to save to buy her son’s freedom. Summer made clothes, Foxglove danced for men, they all relied on plastic as currency and so Coral spent her days plucking recyclable plastic from the brackish water of a nearby river. Fall held school for children who might show up. Her partner, Trillium, did tattooing for the girls who worked at Trashlands, the garishly-lit club that lent its name to the junkyard where everyone lived. Plucking, in fact, was the only way she had to make money. She supposed that in The Els, where damage from floods was minimal, people had clean water and heat but as a plucker in Scrappalachia, the only thing Coral knew for sure about was plastic. Fall her entire life, and she knew he wouldn’t make things like that up. Fall was the only one in Trashlands who was old enough to remember those things, and so most people were skeptical. Fresh, clean water from a pipe and heat from the floor.
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