Children's Literature: Strange Happenings and Eco-Anxiety

BET À DAY

Rivière-Bleue is a small village where nothing ever happens. In fact, nothing ever happened there… Because for Théo and Célia, two teenagers who live there, several strange things seem to have been happening there for some time. The two friends share deep environmental convictions and Theo suffers from eco-anxiety. When the local textile factory dumps toxic dyes into the river, they notice that some locals are starting to change…

According to the Office québécois de la langue française, solastalgia is a distress felt by a person in the face of losses or changes affecting their immediate environment, due to climate change. Author Hervé Gagnon, a master of thrillers, brilliantly uses this background to immerse us in a well-crafted, powerful and mysterious plot!

Théo and Célia are endearing and strong characters who join a crowd of teenagers. Theo has a huge heart. He befriends an elderly homeless woman and even manages to convince her mother to invite her over to recover from a health problem. The young man is constantly torn by his eco-anxiety. He wants to do well – he takes care of his own vegetable garden, at home, but he feels that it is too late for his small gestures to change anything about the tragic fate that awaits the planet.

Supernatural changes?

As a reader, you might therefore think that you have just stuck your nose in a book that will expose you to a world where natural disasters caused by climate change are on the increase, but this story is so much more than that. 

By investigating the changes in the attitudes of certain villagers since toxic dyes were dumped in the river, Théo and Célia identify the links between these people and when they follow them into the forest, they realize that yes, the end of the world may be today, but that the universe is much more complex and less “realistic” that they believed it…

A good suspense screaming topicality, reading Solastalgia is like the Earth: it is certainly not flat!

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