For fans of Lidia Yuknavitch and Ling Ma, Trashlands is a gripping and wildly imaginative literary speculative novel about a woman searching for her son, and for meaning through the impossible task of creating art in a world that doesn’t value it, in a near-future setting where climate has changed the geography and plastic is currency.
In the region-wide junkyard in the remote mountains of what was once Appalachia, Coral lives and works in a group of migrant workers called pluckers, because they pluck plastic—one of the nation’s primary currencies now—from rivers and fields to sell or trade. Along with her partner, a tattoo artist named Trillium, Coral lives in an old school bus at Trashlands, a dump named for the strip club at the edge of the junkyard, whose neon sign casts a pink glow over everything and whose owner rules as unofficial mayor. Many of the local women are also dancers at the club, though Coral has always resisted that particular path.
Coral spends her days fishing out plastic to sell, in a seemingly impossible bid to save enough to rescue her son from the recycling factories. He was kidnapped by child labor traffickers seven years ago, and Coral has been stuck at Trashlands ever since. She spends her precious spare hours creating art pieces from some of the refuse: sculptures that she leaves anonymously in the woods.
A reporter named Miami arrives from the “elite” coastal cities, and he promises to pay Coral to be his guide to the area. What Coral and Miami don’t count on is falling in love. Coral has a choice, for maybe the first time in her difficult life, to stay or to strike out with Miami for the cities on the coast. It could mean more opportunities for safety, for food, for work. It could mean a chance to practice the art that has always called to Coral. But it would mean leaving the only family she’s every known—and it would mean her son wouldn’t know where to find her, should he finally escape.
When an infection caused by a random, stupid injury uses up all of Coral’s hard-won savings, Coral is faced with an unhappy proposition: if she dances at Trashlands, the owner will pay her everything she needs.
Told in multiple, alternating perspectives, Trashlands is a love story to survival in an unloved place, a testament to the enduring powers of art and resistance, and a tale of one mother’s strength to overcome the unbearable.
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