I’m a sucker for a good dystopian novel, and Pink Slime is up there among the best (it’s also subtler and more nuanced than the title would suggest). In an unnamed South American city, an environmental catastrophe is unfolding: the streets are alternately blanketed by an all-encompassing fog and buffeted by a red wind, the result of a deadly algae bloom that has poisoned the air, while the population is slowly dying. Caught in the past – between her former husband and her mother, between her memories and ugly reality, between the fog and the wind – the novel’s unnamed narrator is unable to move forward. The result is elegiac, beautiful and haunting.
Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías, (List Price: $24, Scribner, 9781668049778, July 2024)
Reviewed by Jude Burke-Lewis, Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi