Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, Vanity Fair, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Refinery 29, Men’s Journal, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Book Riot, Los Angeles Magazine, Powells, BookPage and Kirkus Reviews The much-anticipated first novel from a Story Prize-winning “5 Under 35” fiction writer. In 2012, Claire Vaye Watkins’s story collection, writer.
In 2012, Claire Vaye Watkins’s story collection, Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short fiction. Now this young writer, widely heralded as a once-in-a-generation talent, returns with a first novel that harnesses the sweeping vision and deep heart that made her debut so arresting to a love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future:
Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most “Mojavs,” prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps. In Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs—Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the “forever war” turned surfer—squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.
The couple’s fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. They head east, a route strewn with danger: sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a visionary dowser—a diviner for water—and his followers, who whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes.
Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own.
From the Hardcover edition.
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If you love speculative fiction, have an interest in cults, wonder what the future of the west is without water, and love to read a risk-taking, swashbuckler of a new American female novelist-then this book is for you! I knew I was fated to read this book when the Bancroft librarian found it for me as I was researching authors for my drought anthology. Then I learned she was born in Bishop! I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even though some scenes were challenging to read on the page. But the Amargosa Dunes that take over the west are truly compelling and I’ve not been able to stop thinking about them since I read this book two years ago!
Gold Fame Citrus is set in a near future of extreme drought on the West Coast when most have fled the Golden State as giant dunes devour the land. What remains in the desert are the dregs of society, skittering like bands of rats over the leftovers of the rich and famous. The two main characters, Luz, a former poster child, and Ray, an army deserter, flow through this landscape like grains of sand tossed in the wind, unable to direct their lives. At a gathering of vagabonds, a child appears, lost and yet not lost. Luz decides to take the child and raise her, but the decision shoves them onto a path they had not planned. They flee east into the sea of dunes, imperiling their lives—and their souls.
Gold Fame Citrus is not a happy-go-lucky novel—think Lord of the Flies meets The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—but Watkin adds touches of humor into the crevices of her story, particularly wrapped around the character of Sal, exposed to the outside world through a pin hole of bizarre television shows, such as “Embalming with the Stars” and “Midgets of Middle Management,” and who befriends Ray when he finds himself trapped in Limbo Mine.
Reminiscent of Huxley and LeGuin, Watkins expertly weaves strands of metaphor and angst into this dystopian parable reflecting the ugliness and tenuous nature of humanity on the edge of survival. The insane, the desperate, and the unlucky gather in the middle of the desert into a tribe, devolving into hunter-gatherers, and ruled by an enigmatic master. The fantastical world Watkins creates on an ocean of sand, scattered with peculiar and broken characters, is more akin to a disturbing Alice in Wonderland than “what if” climate fiction. In fact, Gold Fame Citrus is a searing revelation of our human condition and the deep wounds within that never heal, crippling us along our journey in life.
I started out with this book and put it down for a couple of weeks. Picked it up and couldn’t put it down. Read it through the night. This was a really good read
Not your usual post-apocalyptic book. The lead character was great, complex and well-drawn.
Great writing but silly environmental quasi-religious nonsense ruins the book. This writer needs an actual story to tell.
Very disappointed. Hard to grasp the point. Hated most of the characters. Bizarre.
Clunky and hard to read in the middle. Not my favorite book. I think the author may have tried too hard to create a distopia and it got out of control.
It was good
Did not like the book.
The prose was in a future syntax which made it harder to breeze through but the imagery was full and witty.
Really stupid
An imaginative and challenging depiction of the apocalyptic future when the American West dissolves into a moving sea of sand.
Weirdly satisfying
Tried and tried to get through the book. Too many creative errors.
Brilliant writing and really dark setting.
Pretensious