Midnight at the Electric

Despite her prickly nature, sixteen-year-old Adri Ortiz has been chosen as one of the youngest Mars colonists. Leaving her waterlogged Miami home behind (it's the year 2065, and rising sea levels have swallowed up coastal areas), she relocates to Kansas for training, moving into an old farmhouse with 107-year-old Lily, her only living relative. Although Adri is just as slow to warm up to Lily's offer of friendship as she is to her fellow prospective colonists, she finds her focus when she discovers both a journal (from 1934, kept by a woman named Cathy, who fought to survive and take care of her sister on the same farm during the Dust Bowl) and a collection of letters sent to Cathy's mother, Beth (by Beth's one-time best friend Lenore, writing in England at the end of World War I). The narrative moves among the three timelines as Adri becomes engrossed in learning what happened to Cathy, how Lenore fits in, and how these more-than-century-old strangers are connected to her own family--even as she prepares herself to leave the planet forever. Anderson vividly captures each of the eras, especially the unrelenting 1930s dust storms. Each of the three protagonists has a distinctive voice, from Cathy's matter-of-factness ("Anyone who can get you to eat pickled tumbleweed can get you to do anything") to Adri's self-protective standoffishness to Lenore's painful struggle to cope with her grief over her soldier brother's death and the loss of an important friendship. The three narratives conclude in a satisfying resolution that unites the many threads. sarah rettger