Mysterious child offers hope in a grim future

The world is dying, and all that’s left are the poisonous mosses and the unrelenting sea. The last of humanity is living pinched between the two in the Colony.

In The Drowned Man’s Daughter, Canadian author C.J. Lavigne paints a dreary picture of a hopeless future in the wake of ecological disaster.

The only way for anyone to have children is to succumb to the moss and eat its berries, which mentally and physically changes them. One day, months after finding an unknown drowned man on their shores, they find a baby.

The Colony, desperate for any sliver of hope, assumes she’s the drowned man’s daughter and, by extension, daughter of the sea. They look at her with awe and fear, and ask her to do impossible things like command the weather and the waves.

But Naia is just a person like any other, and she’s living under the crushing weight of expectations she can never hope to live up to.

The cast of characters is very small, and all they know is each other. They have different ways of coping with their deteriorating world. In around 160 pages, readers get to know them intimately through the way they treat Naia.

Some hate her, some revere her, but they all love her.

Naia’s situation is a constant moral dilemma. She knows she’s not special, tells everyone often, but bends to their beliefs at the same time, trying her very hardest to be what they want her to be.

The Drowned Man’s Daughter is about the responsibility of faith and leadership. It’s about doing the best you can with what you have, and the blurred lines between surviving and coping.

Lavigne’s novella warns of climate change’s long-term threat by putting readers in the fictional shoes of their grandchildren’s grandchildren.

Trapped between fatal dangers, Naia is forced to come to terms with her own leadership. She wonders, if everyone is dying with the world anyway, is some false hope better than no hope at all?

Owen White is a writer and editor who appreciates books he can read in one sitting.