Land Marks: A Novel

by Maryann Lesert

Overview

Once you've experienced the devastation of fracking, nothing but stopping it makes sense. After a year of well site visits and protests, four college student activists become determined to protect the people and the places they love.

In the river-crossed northwoods of Michigan, Kate, Brett, Sonya, and Mark, mentored by their former professor Rebecca, keep watch as North American Energy (NorA) connects a corridor of frack well sites deep in the state forests. When NorA expands in unexpected directions and their awful, bigger plan becomes clear, the action begins.

As grassroots activists gather and prepare to stop NorA’s dangerous superfrac, stresses other than the fracturing of the bedrock appear. Sonya is arrested, Rebecca reveals her hidden past, and the one person who knows both women’s stories arrives in camp. Love and solidarity want to win, even if most showdowns with Big Oil don’t end well for those who take a stand.

Suspenseful, poignant, and galvanizing, Land Marks is a tribute to the waterways that connect us, the land that sustains us, and the moments that inspire us to rise up together to say, “No more!”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647426477
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	04/16/2024
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Maryann Lesert writes about people and place in equal measure. Her first novel, Base Ten (Feminist Press, 2009), featured an astrophysicist’s quest for self among Lake Michigan’s forested dunes and the stars. Land Marks grew from two years of boots-on-well-sites research on fracking. Before novels, Maryann wrote plays, including three full-lengths, five one-acts, and collaborations with a memoirist and a local symphony. Maryann lives in west Michigan, where she teaches writing, enjoys time in the natural world (shared with family and friends), and writes by the big lake.

Editorial Reviews

02/19/2024

A group of anti-fracking activists face off with oil and gas executives in the energizing latest from Lesert (Base Ten). Rebecca Walton, an English professor at an unnamed Michigan university, forms a bond with four students from her eco-literature class. Over two summers, they photograph fracking sites, attend community meetings, and build friendships with local landowners turned activists. When she learns that Sonya, a former student, was arrested for trespassing at a site, Rebecca joins with Sonya’s friends in simultaneous direct-action demonstrations across Michigan. The operation involves roadblocks on service roads, dancing grandmothers protecting other activists who have chained themselves to a fracking well, and boaters who stage an oil spill in the Straits of Mackinac. Rebecca, wary of crossing a line into criminal behavior and losing her job, weighs the risk of arrest against her sense of moral urgency (“The pain of observing—of knowing and photographing and writing but stopping short of doing”). Some of the characterizations are a bit thin, but as the story unfolds, Lesert illustrates the protestors’ sacrifices and the joy that springs from their joining together, clarifying for readers the environmental and human costs of fracking. This polemical outing is both an elegy for ecosystems already lost and a call to action. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

An impassioned story of anti-fracking activism.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"This book will make you feel alive. Land Marks puts the reader on the gritty front lines of activism as Rebecca Walton, Lesert’s unforgettable protagonist, and a committed band of activists risk it all to battle fracking on Michigan soil. The final pages had me weeping with joy."
—Katy Yocom, author of Three Ways to Disappear, winner of the Siskiyou Prize for Environmental Literature

"Land Marks, Maryann Lesert’s savvy, mindful, and dramatic novel of intergenerational education and place defense, is writing as nonviolent direct action, principled and powerful."
—Stephanie Mills, author of Tough Little Beauties and In Service of the Wild

 "Through complicated characters and a compelling fictional narrative, Lesert gives readers a taste of the dedication and commitment of real people and groups working to protect the Great Lakes from the ravages of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. . . . For tragically, this book is even more timely today than when it was selected as a 2021 Finalist for the Prism Prize for Climate Literature."
—Gail Collins-Ranadive, author of Dinosaur Dreaming, Our Climate Moment

"Land Marks is an important and powerful novel, and deserves its place in a growing literature of ecological resistance. Read it, and then act."
—Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older Than Words and Endgame

From the Publisher

2024-01-19
An environmentally minded professor revisits her activist past in Lesert’s novel.

When university professor Rebecca Walton happens to recognize former student Sonya’s image as it flashes across the screen during a nighttime news report, she recalls the events of the previous two years when she, Sonya, and three other students took part in an anti-fracking environmental movement. The four students were among the few who signed up for her new Eco-Literature class in 2012; the newly designed course was shaped by their interests, which eventually led them to take their research into the field and engage in activism. Walton was formerly known as activist “Elizabeth Stone, a rescue climber and writer inside of actions.” This secret was kept from her students for their protection, but when Walton returns to her old activist ways due to her concern for Sonya, the truth becomes known to them when another secret rooted in Rebecca’s past is eventually uncovered. As the narrative alternates between the present day and various periods in the past, the order in which some information is presented or omitted (such as who the “Four Branches” were, why Walton went by “Elizabeth Stone,” and the depth of her relationship with David, a fellow activist) will disorient readers. The blow-by-blow account of the group’s activism could use some tailoring to focus on key moments that would move the story in a dynamic way. For those unfamiliar with fracking, the author doesn’t provide enough background information to bring them up to speed, instead jumping right into using insider terminology in passages describing the process and many more detailing the harm it causes. But the writing shines when Lesert writes about the environment using poetic imagery that’s reverential of the land, “inextricably intertwined with the wildlife and the people who roamed it.”

An impassioned story of anti-fracking activism.

Kirkus Reviews