Hurricane Trinity

by Nick Rees Gardner

As climate change ravages the small beach town of Sunport, Alabama, Devin feels increasingly unfit to prepare her children for what can only be a bleak future. Her mental health devolves overtime into lethargy and despair until Devin meets an unhoused woman, Trinity. With Trinity's guidance, Devin explores a newfound freedom and will to live.

90 pages, Paperback

Published December 5, 2023

About the author

Nick Gardner is a writer, critic, writing teacher, and beer and wine buyer. His books include, So Marvelously Far, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2019), an accounting of addiction and recovery in the Rustbelt; and Hurricane Trinity (Unsolicited Press, 2023), a climate change novella. His linked story collection, Delinquents, is forthcoming in August 2024 from Madrona Books. He’s received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the De Groot Foundation, and DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He lives in Ohio and Washington, DC.

Reviews

[Chad]

Shifting through multiple perspectives, this novella discusses big issues (mental health, climate change) without ever losing sight of the compelling characters or plot.


And the characters are great! Devin provides the novella's center as a mother who feels her life is being swallowed as surely as the tides are rising to swallow the shore. She is raising her family in a house that faces the ocean, insistent on surviving the onslaught of the inevitable hurricanes. The whole story feels like a staring contest between the individual and "the void," here embodied by the vastness of the ocean.

I was never sure where this story was going, but each development worked. The story moves through time effortlessly, as Devin's kids grow and react to their doomed seaside existence. It's a question we almost ask ourselves: how do we live on the brink of disaster (whether personal, or societal)? There aren't easy answers, but this book navigates the question in exciting ways.

[Joe Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the moment I started Hurricane Trinity, I knew I'd be finishing it. And then what happened 2 days later? I closed the final page on a novella that really moved me.

The prose is just so smooth, and the protagonist just too real. How deeply I felt for Devin the whole way through, not only as a parent doing whatever she can to get by but just as a human living on a planet that's drowning. I really enjoyed this short, swift, affecting book and think you would too.

[Cross-post from Amazon, but they haven't approved it yet!]

[Boyd Addlesperger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This small book is not to be missed. Nick Rees Gardner's first book of fiction shows an understanding of the human condition that is shockingly sharp for someone so young. Gardner follows the uneven trajectory of the life of Devon, focusing on her emotional struggles as a young mother, but also touching on her life as she grows older. Devon is running, always running. Whether she is running to something or away is a question that is never completely answered. The reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions. Along the way, she befriends a homeless woman named Trinity who is the very antithesis of Devon's middle-class life and watches as hurricane after hurricane gnaw away at the small ocean-front town in which her family lives. In the end, Hurricane Trinity sweeps away nearly everything, but maybe not quite enough for Devon. She is still running.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hurricanes bring devastation and reveal weak points in our infrastructure. They speed up the natural process of death and destruction.

Sometimes, if you build a strong enough foundation, you can withstand the storm.

When the storms come for Devin and her young family, will she have the strength to withstand them? Has she built a foundation that will last or will she succumb to the hurricanes all around her?

[Tim DeMarco · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short but powerful novella tackles topics such as mental health, climate change, and parenthood. This guy can write. I’m excited to read more!