Wild Dark Shore
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I didn’t have ‘reading a psychological-thriller set in a remote Antarctic island while nursing my firstborn’ on my 2025 Bingo card, but here we are! Wild Dark Shore exposed me to a very unique world. While Shearwater Island is fictional, it’s based on the Svalbard Seed Vault, which safeguards millions of seeds as an insurance plan for global catastrophe. This book explores the fragility of our attempts to combat climate change and what that says about our moral failings as a species.
Wild Dark Shore is special in that it’s not one particular genre. The setting itself is unlike anything I’ve ever read. This had its pros and cons– I was intrigued by the nature scenes (there was a particularly moving whale scene that made me tear up), but it was also tough to visualize. As such, it’s difficult to fully capture the gravity of their situation when things go sideways. I couldn’t picture it in my mind’s eye, and I like to think I have decent imagination.
Another complaint I have is that it shoves its agenda down your throat. And that’s coming from a token, environmentally-conscious liberal! I think that it’s good to have climate change awareness permeate literature. It’s one thing for a book to be explicitly about climate change, like Bill Gates’ How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, but it’s also beneficial for society’s collective consciousness when we’re exposed to the realities of climate change in less overt ways. It affects our day-to-day lives– why shouldn’t it affect the day-to-day lives of the characters in the media we consume? That being said, Wild Dark Shore was often too on the nose. It dipped into preachy territory, doing it a disservice by overshadowing the characters and the plot. Even though I wasn’t that interested in the storyline, Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver enmeshed climate change consequences within the plot more seamlessly, humming in the background rather than taking over center stage.
Overall, Wild Dark Shore’s unexpected setting, coupled with the sinister thriller element really wowed me. It impressed me because I’ve truly never read anything like it. That being said, its uniqueness was both a pro and a con; it had such a surreal quality to it that I never really connected with the characters or the place, and all the while, I was getting beaten over the head with an agenda. Even though let the record show that I agree with the agenda! Wild Dark Shore receives 3 out of 5 flames.
