Land Marks
A Novel
Maryann Lesert’s novel Land Marks captures the intensity and passion of climate activism in Michigan.
Rebecca hasn’t written under her activist’s pseudonym (Elizabeth Stone) in years. After a deadly protest at a nature preserve, she was forced to step back and become a professor. Now, she grows close to the students in her Eco Lit class, including short but fiery Kate, shy Brett, tech-savvy Mark, and Sonya, a composed young mother. She also begins touring well sites with them, taking photographs of the environmental impact and meeting people whose property and health were compromised by fracking. But “Elizabeth Stone” is torn from her retirement when Rebecca’s students and some of her old friends wind up at the center of a monumental protest against a dangerous new fracking project.
The connection that Rebecca and her students have to each other and to the environment is palpable, built up by Rebecca’s tendency to talk to the trees and via beautiful, heartbreaking moments, as when a beloved old tree, christened “Mildred,” is bulldozed. Through them, the novel achieves true tenderness.
The novel’s tone mimics that of personal journalism; it reads like one of Elizabeth Stone’s articles. She, as the narrator, includes herself only to the necessary extent, choosing instead to focus on the particulars of the well sites, the protests, the big oil companies, and the victims of fracking whose stories she shares. While this professional tone makes it difficult to know Rebecca intimately, it keeps the story focused on its activism—just as she would have liked.
Land Marks is a novel that captures the unpleasant truths of fracking through a human lens, not only breaking hearts but warming them, too.
Reviewed by
Emily Gaines
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