The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed
The Annual Migration of Clouds is an upcoming novella by Indo-Caribbean/Canadian author Premee Mohamed, whose work I'm most familiar with from her Lovecraftian horror-thriller series that began with Beneath the Rising (Reviewed Here). Mohamed's an author other writers I follow have highly recommended, and I've enjoyed a little bit, but hasn't really clicked for me the way she has for others. So I was interested to see if my opinion would change outside of the Beneath The Rising setting.
And this novella is really interesting and very much the type of story that generally appeals to me - a character focused story - set in a post-apoc Canada - featuring a young woman/teen in a world with seemingly no escape, with a parasitic illness affecting her mind and a mother who depends on her, given a chance at a new life in a better outside world, and feeling all the guilt that entails. It's a story about relationships, about one's own will, about the risks one takes, and it works really well.
Quick Plot Summary: The world has been ruined since before Reid was born - ruined by climate change, by the loss of reproductive rights, and by greed, and so the rich fled into their domed occupancies with their technology while the rest of the world grouped together to try to survive with what little they remained to understand. And of course there is the Cad, the parasitic entity that is passed down by birth, which infects people and affects their minds and bodies.
Reid has long resigned herself to living and dying in her community, caring for her mother and hanging with her one friend, and dealing with the Cad as the parasite gets worse inside of her. But then she receives a response to an application to a school inside one of the domes, an application she expected nothing of, inviting her to leave and join them. But with Reid's mother depending upon her, a mother debilitated by the Cad and other work and emotionally insisting that the invite is a sham, and with her knowing nothing else but her community, can she really leave them all? And if she can, are her decisions being made by herself or being influenced by the Cad?
Thoughts: This novella features the struggles of Reid in a world that has fallen apart for reasons that are extrapolations of our current world - reproduction rights taken away, environmental disasters, the works - leaving the unfortunate survivors with nothing but each other and memories of how the world used to be (and with memories of how technology should work but not how it necessarily will). And so these people are so tied together, even as they're slowly dying out - from hunger, from environmental disasters (a dust bowl like incident is described destroying soil), from trying to hunt dangerous beasts (pigs) with weak weapons, or from the Cad. And this leads to relationships that are both understandable and in many ways are kind of abusive.
Foremost is Reid's relationship with her mother, who keeps trying to push in more and more dangerous ways for Reid to stay home with her and supporting her, and who is also suffering from the Cad, such that Reid feels like she can't tell if her mom's actions are her own or the will of the Cad, which is very much inspired by self-preservation above all else (or so it seems). It's an abusive relationship as her mother never tries to see what Reid needs and how Reid keeps putting herself out there to try and help her mother, and its the biggest struggle for Reid to overcome. That said, Reid's best friend Henryk forms the other struggle, in that he's a cowardly boy who could do very little without her support (their other true companion having left long ago) and lacks parents, and Reid's underlying concern for him is just as underlying her fears of leaving. And then there's the Cad, which makes Reid feel like she has no choices at all.
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