“Darkness Falls” 

Survival tales can be very empowering.  Imagining exactly how we might cope can make us feel more confident in our hidden strengths. 

Local author A. E. Faulkner has written a young adult dystopian novel, about two teenage sisters, Quinn and Riley, who are left to survive on their own after losing their parents in an earthquake related accident. The earthquake is just the beginning – the challenges the girls face result from years of human activities that are now breaking out in natural disasters. Nature has gone awry, and these two teenagers are caught between their recent comfortable childhood and the need to step up to cope with this new world on their own. Their immediate needs are food and shelter, and then they must learn who can be trusted. Eventually, they encounter some other stranded teens and combine forces to find a way forward to something that feels like home.

Faulkner has written their adventure in a fast-paced series of escalating challenges, requiring the teens to pool their talents to adapt to each new danger. It ends in a cliffhanger that signals that the natural disasters and human response are unexpectedly intertwined and complex. 

This is the first book in Faulkner’s Nature’s Fury Series.

• Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism by Char Miller
• A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster
• A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf by John Muir
• The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
• Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Feinkel
• J. Horace McFarland: A Thorn for Beauty by Ernest Morrison
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson
• The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
• Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt by Aida D. Donald
• Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons by John Wesley Powell
• The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
• Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose