Wasted? by Hazel Edwards

Title: Wasted?

Author: Hazel Edwards

Genre: Climate Fiction

Publisher: Bookpod

Published: 26^th August 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 250

Price: $28.00

Synopsis: Faced with visa challenges, the asylum seekers prove to be innovators, not victims. Drawing on their resources, they repurpose, recycle and recreate a new state trading biofuel via the mid-ocean Garbage Patches. Teenage Kit illustrates how you can draw a new future as activists turn to science. But what happens in this new world order?

A cross-over YA/adult #Clific novel for those interested in new possibilities.

‘Wasted? explores a mid-ocean Garbage Patch state where asylum seekers recycle biofuel for visas, led by 16-year-old Head of Government known as The GG.

Hazel’s Australian Antarctic expeditioner experience was relevant for the ‘Wasted?’ setting and also the earlier ‘Antarctica’s Frozen Chosen’. Plus, she relied on scientific experts who helped with her research and possible scenarios in addition to conversations with innovative Asylum seekers and refugees.

~*~

Kit is a refugee, living in a new state called Wasted in what feels like a near-future setting, or one that could even be contemporary as well. Kit has been sent to live with his mother amongst refugees and asylum seekers living on a new state in the middle of the ocean. His father is in hospital, and Kit’s time on the Garbage Patch is spent recycling things, trading biofuel, and drawing a new future with art and science. Yet, Kit knows there are threats in this young adult climate fiction novel.

Kit’s world and new world order explores how people react when things drastically change, when the world implodes, and people are gripping onto anything they can to survive.

Kit’s world is vastly different to ours, but still affected by the things that affect us. COVID, climate change, recycling, and how we deal with refugees and asylum seekers. It explores these themes through the reactions of Kit and other people to what happens around them. Their dislike of what they refer to as trauma tourists – tourists who come and take pleasure in seeing how Kit and people in his community are living is palpable. Whilst the characters have accepted where they are living and what they have to do, they still want to make the world better.

Wasted is imbued with mystery and a sense of seeking to create a perfect world, yet there always seems to be something sinister bubbling underneath, as though someone wants to destroy things and ruin the progress that has been made – if that is what they are doing. And as Kit becomes embroiled in the socio-political goings on whilst grappling with his relationship with his mother, the story unfolds piece by piece, emphasising the need to act and stand up for what you believe in.

The novel doesn’t provide solutions – it’s not meant to, but it does give readers something to think about. It provokes us into thinking about climate change and how it is affecting and going to affect the world, and what people might be forced into, or how they might have to live. It also looks at the implications of COVID and what it could do to small community like this, and its ongoing presence in the world. Wasted? is an interesting novel by a well-known Australian author, Hazel Edwards. It feels very real, very immediate and is a timely novel that reminds us of the lengths people have to go to so they can survive climate change.

A very poignant and thought-provoking novel from Hazel Edwards.