Art Theft, Risk, and Hope in an Apocalypse https://ift.tt/WdFRMvV
Andrea L. Rogers’ new young adult novel The Art Thieves presents a post-apocalyptic landscape that, despite challenging characters and readers, still offers paths forward and hope for a dark world. The Art Thieves is a book that is both exciting to read and deeply thoughtful about our reality as well as the larger literary landscape of post-apocalyptic fiction. I couldn’t put it down, and as soon as I finished reading, I wanted to find something else like it. I even found myself hoping that Rogers might be working on a series.
The Art Thieves is reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and is in conversation with Afrofuturism more broadly. Rogers’ novel is not a repetition of Parable of Sower but it does have a young protagonist with first-row seats to the end of the world, and references to Butler are somewhat frequent as the characters in the book are fans. At one point one of them says, “No one has read Octavia Butler too many times.” If you feel like you have read Butler too many times, The Art Thieves is the perfect book for you. Like Butler, Rogers has taken some of the problems we are not currently addressing and given them several decades to develop.
Rogers’ protagonist is Stevie, a young Cherokee woman who works at a museum gift shop. She’s a recent high school graduate looking forward to going to college in Austin, Texas, with her friends Jess and Loren at the end of the summer. All of her plans change when a new artist-in-residence arrives at the museum. His name is Adam, and he is a time-traveling art thief. He says he’s from the year 2201 and has traveled a hundred and fifty years back in time for his current mission. Even though he isn’t really supposed to, he warns Stevie that “the planet is about to let us know, if we don’t live with it, it will live without us.”
Adam’s warning to Stevie includes specific details about how the world is about to change, so even though these revelations are disorienting, she chooses to believe him. She is also facing some intense situations much closer to home, making decisions about time travel, art theft, and her growing crush on Adam even more confusing. Her younger brother is diagnosed with a rare cancer, and her mother is becoming increasingly paranoid, preparing a small home in Indian Country doomsday-prepper style. Then, a car accident puts one of Stevie’s close friends in the hospital, where family tensions threaten the friend group.
Through these challenges, Stevie works to safeguard others, particularly her younger brother, even when doing so puts her at great risk. She asks Adam to take her brother to the future, where his cancer can be treated. When her brother seems to disappear, Stevie is placed on house arrest, watching the situation outside escalate as power outages, disease, and lawlessness increase. Eventually, she notices that the sirens of emergency vehicles, which at one point seemed continuous, have stopped entirely.
Despite all of this, the novel does not give in to hopelessness. An auntie helps Stevie remove her ankle monitor. Another acquaintance helps her drive away to the home her mother has created in Oklahoma. With information from Adam as well as her own intuition and skills, Stevie is able to make her way to somewhere safe, and she is assured that “there will be enough good people left to change things, to make the world a better place, to choose actions that will make things better … not seven generations from now, but soon.”
Rogers, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, offers a thrilling addition to the growing list of post-apocalyptic and post-cautionary tales by Indigenous writers. The developing subgenre is also referenced in the novel, with Stevie noting that “the Greek bits of the word mean ‘to uncover’ and ‘to reveal,’ as in ‘a revelation’” as she wonders “What [is] this decimation of the human population going to reveal?” Specific authors, including Louise Erdrich and Stephen Graham Jones, are mentioned, and Stevie’s mother says that “Indigenous people and people with roots in Africa [are] post-apocalyptic populations.” These perspectives on apocalypse and futurity have been available for quite some time with growing interest in literary circles, and their increasing popularity is well deserved. For readers who are already familiar with these other authors and literary trends, the references help to situate Rogers’ work, but for less familiar readers, the references may serve as a sort of syllabus, offering a suggested reading list well worth pursuing.
FICTION The Art Thieves
Andrea L. Rogers
Levine Querido
Published 8 October 2024
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