After a phenomenal reception for her debut novel Aqueous at the Winter Institute American Booksellers Association convention in Seattle Washington this February, Oakville's Jade Shyback is ready for the real publication launch right here in Oakville on May 10th.
With the launching of her three daughters, Jade was facing a loss-of-identity challenge. While in her professional life she had been a financial regulator, Jade’s first love had been literature. After a small-town childhood in Alberta (on a farm called Mosquito Flats), she did a BA at the University of Calgary in English—"the only faculty that would have me."
Economic reality and the demands of motherhood meant she left that love behind, but with the children reaching adulthood, a void was opening before her. Somehow, that early passion made itself felt again, surging up to fill the gap and redefine Jade’s identity, this time as the writer she felt she was always meant to be.
And so, she gave birth to Aqueous, "my fourth daughter," inspired by a trip along the Pacific Coast Highway with her three human daughters, which she describes beautifully on her website. Jade’s writing story is a story of the courage to change directions, to embark on a new path, embrace change and the unknown. It has its parallels in her first novel.
Aqueous is the kind of book you simply can’t put down and promises to be the beginning of a great adventure, as its cliff-hanger ending portends a series, perhaps with the potential of The Hunger Games.
The premise is the rescue of a young girl from a climate-change-ravaged planet to a fully built-out world under the ocean. There, a select group of humans is to live and learn and await the healing of the earth’s surface as the emissions of human industrial activity dissipate.
This is dystopian science fiction. Scorching heat, drought and floods have made food increasingly scarce and the surface uninhabitable. While government actions proved inadequate to the challenge of accumulating greenhouse gas emissions, a group of thinkers and scientists planned a series of undersea "merstations", where a core group of humans will be able to live out the period, perhaps over generations, until the surface world becomes inhabitable again.
One girl, six years old, who was not destined to survive, is rescued by a childless couple who are central to the merstation project, given up by her birth mother who knows this is her daughter’s best, perhaps only, chance at a life. Woven into this narrative are questions about biological and adoptive parenting, with hints at reveals in the projected sequels.
Aqueous is the merstation where young Marisol prepares for the trials she will undergo at sixteen, and which will determine her future. She works hard to be assigned to the all-male diving team known as the Cuviers. In her journey to prove to herself and the powers that be that she is worthy, she seeks to excel and to break through misogynistic beliefs, only to discover that the truth has been hidden from her and all of her cohort.
As the book opens, the harsh realization that humanity has failed to reverse the effects of industrialization, that we have let the worst happen, is distressing. Yet the novel is hopeful. The merstation environment is appealingly egalitarian, as the need to cooperate to survive has superseded ethnic and wealth distinctions and conflicts.
Knowing they might need to spend generations beneath the sea, the designers have built a world and a society that offer a welcoming environment, with everything the residents need to find a new kind of happiness. (In a nod to Jade's Canadian roots there is even a curling rink!)
Margaret Mead once wrote that we don’t eat what we like, we like what we eat. Children in hot climates love the spices that made it possible for ingredients to be stored before refrigeration, and they find the food of northern climates uninteresting and bland. In the same way, the children of the Aqueous merstation have little memory of life above the ocean, and in any case what they knew was already degraded.
So, their adaptation to the undersea community is plausible, even inspiring. Jade knows whereof she speaks, having lived in the 52 degree C heat of the UAE when working as an expat financial regulator.
"There is much to learn from the Emirates," she says, "They thrive in extreme heat," expressing optimism in spite of the dystopian future of which she writes.
One of the ways to deal with dread or worry is hypothetically to face the worst case, and then to imagine how one might make the best of it. As we all deal with the threat of climate disaster, Aqueous, apart from being compelling, page-turning reading, takes us through just such an exercise. This is a must read, especially for young adults growing up in this time when they cannot help but wonder if the measures their elders are taking will be enough, and soon enough, to preserve for them our goldilocks planet. Even in this worst case scenario, there is love, hope and inspiration.
The launch party is at the Oakville Club, 56 Water Street, from 2 to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, May 10. The book is now available for pre-order online here.
