The Displacements

May 9, 2022
In Holsinger’s harrowing novel of environmental disaster (after The Gifted School), an unprecedented category 6 hurricane obliterates Miami and disrupts a once-charmed family. Before the storm hits, Daphne Larsen-Hall has a great life—pampered wife of a wealthy surgeon, with a two-million-dollar home in Coral Gables and two bright children, Oliver and Mia. But after Hurricane Luna, Daphne’s life is upended. Homeless and penniless due to a cascading series of setbacks, she and the children end up evacuated to a megashelter in Oklahoma run by no-nonsense FEMA official Rain Holton. There, among 10,000 other evacuees, her sullen stepson Gavin falls under the spell of two drug dealers and Mia becomes obsessed with playing a kids’ game called Range. Then, after the final indignity of losing her wedding and engagement rings, Daphne decides to become an art teacher in the camp. Two months in, many evacuees have formed “ethnic enclaves,” including one called Crackertown, which Holsinger describes as a “dark edge of pride in self-designation.” Then Rain contends with a new weather emergency threatening the shelter. Holsinger does a good job exploring the country’s cultural and economic divisions and the effects of climate change, and is even better with the characters and their ever-mounting problems. This story of displacement and desperation packs a wallop.

Starred review from May 15, 2022
When the world's first Category 6 storm destroys Miami and Houston, a FEMA megashelter in Oklahoma becomes part of the setting for the harsh aftermath, measured in unraveling lives. "Twenty-four hours ago I was a wealthy surgeon's wife leaving my huge house with three kids and a dog in a hybrid SUV. Now I'm a sweating, penniless refugee dragging a wheelie bag up a rural road." In the lingo of Holsinger's ambitious novel, former rich White lady and sculptor Daphne Larsen-Hall is now an IDP, an Internally Displaced Person--aka a Luna, for the hurricane that created a whole new class of Americans, numbering in the millions. Luna "strikes Miami as if beating on some mountain-size drum....She moves like a drunken butcher, flaying skyscrapers, eviscerating offices and conference rooms and lobbies....The guts of civilization swarm and fly: desks, chairs, tables, carpets, lights, plants, computers, printers, books, and papers by the billions, landing in the rivered streets, pulped through the sewer channels, chewed by the winds." Holsinger's lush writing about the storm is complemented by "The Great Displacement: A Digital Chronicle of the Luna Migration," an interactive website including interview transcripts, maps, and charts, displayed here as screenshots. For example, one survivor, now a Ph.D. in critical disaster studies, reports, "Doesn't surprise me that what finally focused the nation's attention on the megashelters was that spectacle in Oklahoma, what went down at Tooley Farm. There you had a perfect storm of climate change, displacement, extremism, and racial difference swirling around these white bodies at the center of it all, the big pale eye of the storm." Interspersed with these reports are chapters telling Daphne's story as well as those of her three difficult children (her teenage stepson, Gavin, maliciously leaves her purse in the driveway when they flee); the African American woman who runs Tooley Farm for FEMA; the drug dealer/insurance agent who is there to squeeze every penny he can get out of the refugees; and his sidekick/girlfriend, a guitar player who starts the cover band that gives the book its title. From Range, a complicated street game all the children are playing, to wildfire, the opiate many of their parents are getting addicted to, Holsinger's storm of invented detail is Category 6. Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly believable. Seems destined to be a blockbuster.

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Starred review from June 1, 2022
Holsinger (The Gifted School, 2019) takes on the impending climate crisis in this new addition to the burgeoning cli-fi genre. A record category 6 hurricane is projected to hit Miami with very little advance notice. The Larsen-Hall family prepares for the quick evacuation of their $2 million dollar home as the patriarch and main provider, Dr. Brantley Hall, is rushed away to accompany a medivac evacuation. The family of two young children, a 19-year-old stepson, and a dog is subsequently led by wife and mother Daphne, who inadvertently leaves all their monetary resources in her purse on the driveway to be washed away along with the whole of the city. Hurricane Luna then swells and takes out most of Houston. The resulting displaced mass of humanity from two devastated American cities makes its way to megashelters erected at various locations across flyover states. The Larsen-Hall family finds itself on Tooley Farm in Oklahoma, left to scrape together what little they have left to survive. Holsinger collects America's flaws and scant empathy in this breakneck novel. Issues of opioid addiction, toxic masculinity, microaggressions, and limited resource-sharing make for compressed yet monumental circumstances within the perimeter of Tooley Farm. This bleak but resilient view of a harsh future surely entertains, and it also hearkens to hope.

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