| Category: | Fiction - Cultural |
|---|---|
| Author: | Curtis Palmer |
| Publisher: | FriesenPress |
| Publication Date: | February 14, 2025 |
| Number of Pages: | 270 |
| ISBN-10: | 1038318297 |
| ISBN-13: | 978-1038318299 |
Curtis Palmer's Domesteaders: Cloud 8.5 is a gleefully
eccentric Canadian epic that opens in 1967 and follows teenage BB (Beavan
Broderick) as he cycles from Edmonton to Vancouver on a solo “rideabout” into
manhood. Robbed and broke, he is taken in by Sam, an Auschwitz survivor and
pawn-shop owner who offers unique lessons on the value of objects and their
stories. This launches BB into beaver ethology, economics, and a lifelong hunt
for his absent father, GK, a Chicago-school economist tangled in Nixon-era
American politics. Along the way, BB rants against car culture, restores a
study pond his father dynamited, and quietly sabotages GK’s golf course with beavers.
Decades later, he survives the Fort McMurray wildfire inside a beaver lodge, coming
out with a mysterious slime that pulls him into Melissa’s circle of dreamers—musicians,
drone pilots, chemists, and geneticists. This circle spins archaea, spider
silk, and beaver ponds into dirigibles—Cycle Cities—and a utopian
transportation revolution that culminates in disaster relief after the Cascadia
megaquake.
Curtis Palmer's character work is impeccable, with BB’s
stentorian bar-room rants, blind Ali's silk “hand,” and Asher’s dome-building
eco-schemes commanding attention. The characters are not just complex and
believable but eccentric. This fast-paced, enthralling tale skillfully fuses
countercultural satire, speculative high-tech, and family saga, with an
affectionate wink to Pynchon (Lot 49 included). The structure of Domesteaders:
Cloud 8.5 is unapologetically digressive, filled with genealogies, transcripts,
and conspiratorial “Dear Reader” asides. The plot is a decades-spanning road to
travel, yet the book grips through sheer invention; from “Elementropics’
economics to the Pembina Braid, it is astonishingly detailed and weirdly
plausible. Themes of climate repair, Indigenous history, interspecies
cooperation, and anti-consumerism give the whimsy nature of the story a lot to
think about. Palmer’s prose has a unique spell, delivered through puns and
infectious enthusiasm. The book is a big-hearted, brainy, and beaver-obsessed one-of-a-kind
ride.
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