That feeling of being marketed to is gross. The feeling of “discovering” a book because you read about it on social media or through a friend’s recommendation in real life can’t be beat. It’s the latter that brought Shifting Earth into my life. A reposted Bluesky comment from Shifting Earth’s author, Cecil Castellucci, drew me in.
In the post on October 25th, she wrote, “It’s my birthday! I’d like world peace, a functioning democracy, and to continue to be a working writer! So my big wish is that you buy, borrow, or boost one of my books today!” One of the books along with the image was Shifting Earth. I placed a hold on it at the library and waited a little while for it to come in. (All the others were already checked out, system-wide!)
You might glean from the title of the book that we are dealing with parallel worlds and you would be correct. In addition to that, there are parallel narratives. Not all of these elements are immediately apparent from the start, which gives you a chance to deal with some disorientation as you get going.
Calling Maeve Lindholm the protagonist feels strange with all those competing plot lines, but she’s who we meet first, so let’s go with it. She’s a scientist who is trying to preserve plant life and seeds in the event of inevitable climate disaster. Sound familiar? She’s widowed (or at least her partner is dead) and she has a rival who works on similar grounds but from a corporate or industry perspective. There’s plenty of tension between their competing desires for each other and for their visions of different futures.
In a clever use of panels and gutters, the literal parallel story of astronomy researcher Zuzi Reed unfolds. She is trying to get attention and funding from an academy that seems more interested in terrestrial matters than those of different planets. The refrain of “let’s solve the problems of Earth before we explore the stars” that can stand in the way of making any kind of progress on any planet. Her partner is a geologist who is supportive of Zuzi’s work at the expense of using some of her own project’s funding.
Things turn upside down for everyone when a coronal mass ejection sends Maeve to an actual parallel world where a man who appears to be her deceased ex-lover is still alive. He plays an important role in a world that is structured around an entirely different set of values. Maeve sees “steam-powered walkways, solar panels, rainwater recycling, green architecture… the green dream realized” (p. 35). For all its benefits, there are some glaring drawbacks that its residents aren’t able to comprehend. In a bit of explanation that sounds similar to The Community in Lois Lowry’s The Giver, it is important for people in this parallel society to be “of use,” otherwise, well… It’s said that animals who are of no use are “sacrificed and returned,” which is why there are livestock corpses floating in a river. Gruesome, indeed.
To help Maeve better understand the world she’s entered, Ben (not Ben) takes Maeve to a play that retells the creation myth of the sun and twin moons of his world. This scene is only a spread long, but it does something really cool—it makes the parallel world seem more real by giving it a unique history and mythology. The costumes and speech patterns (represented via distinctly different lettering by Steve Wands) reveal that a lot of care went into what is only a small bit of in-universe explanation of “how things work” for Maeve. It provides a sense of wonder that a simple, illustrated dialogue exchange between the Maeve and Ben (not Ben) would not have achieved. Better still, it ends with a box of inner dialogue that sums up the story-within-the-story and the nature of storytelling itself quite well. “We all make up stories to make sense of the world. Like the one I’m telling you now” (p. 74). Now that I’ve read Castellucci’s Shifting Earth, I’m eager to read Soupy Leaves Home and The Plain Janes, as well as some of their other made up stories that help make sense of our shared world.
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