Not Dark Yet

by Berit Ellingsen

Brandon leaves his boyfriend in the city for a quiet life in the mountains, after an affair with a professor ends with Brandon being forced to kill a research animal. It is a violent, unfortunate episode that conjures memories from his military background.

In the mountains, his new neighbors are using the increased temperatures to stage an agricultural project in an effort to combat globally heightened food prices and shortages. Brandon gets swept along with their optimism, while simultaneously applying to a new astronaut training program. However, he learns that these changes—internal, external—are irreversible.

A sublime love story coupled with the universal struggle for personal understanding, Not Dark Yet is an informed novel of consequences with an ever-tightening emotional grip on the reader.

"Fascinating, surreal, gorgeously written, and like nothing you’ve ever read before, Not Dark Yet is the book we all need to read right now. It is art about science, climate change, and activism, and it vitally explores how we as people deal with a world that is transforming in terrifying ways."
—BuzzFeed

"[Ellingsen] is just starting what promises to be a major career, but already giving readers a unique and fascinating perspective."
—Jeff VanderMeer

"I cannot remember the last time a writer impressed me so quickly."
—InDigest Magazine

Berit Ellingsen is a Korean Norwegian writer and former bookseller whose stories have appeared in W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction International Anthology, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Unstuck. She is the author of the story collection Beneath the Liquid Skin, and the novel Une Ville Vide, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the British Science Fiction Award.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, LGBT, Climate Change Fiction, Dystopia, Speculative Fiction, Post Apocalyptic

202 pages, Paperback

First published September 8, 2015

About the author

Berit Ellingsen is the author of three novels, Now We Can See The Moon (Snuggly Books 2018), Not Dark Yet (Two Dollar Radio 2015), and Une ville vide (PublieMonde 2014), a collection of short stories, Beneath the Liquid Skin (Queen's Ferry Press), and a mini-collection of dark fairy-tales, Vessel and Solsvart (Snuggly Books). Her work has been published in W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction International, SmokeLong Quarterly, Unstuck, Litro, Lightspeed, and other places, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the British Science Fiction Association Award. Berit is a member of the Norwegian Authors' Union. http://beritellingsen.com.

Reviews

[Kristin-Leigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won't lie, I really hated this book - the writing felt really purple at times in an amateurish (almost fanfiction-y?) way and it felt to me like Ellingsen was fighting to hit a certain word/pagecount frequently, the way the narrative would get into every detail of the most rote activities - the chapter dedicated to a character paying his restaurant bill, anyone??

The characters all felt generic to me, too, or else more like a checklist of common tropes than a set of people - of course Brandon carries around the guilt of killing kids as an army sniper and for some reason has untreated epilepsy that he needs to hide to appear strong!

All stuff I can forgive in a novel with a really page-turner plot or at least a really unique concept, and NDY just didn't deliver on those fronts for me.

I may be alone in these feelings though, given the number of great reviews it has!

[Kevin Catalano · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how Ellingsen pulled off this novel of seemingly disparate plot points -- a dead owl, wheat farming, astronaut try-outs, a renegade mission -- filled with abstract dreams, and set in an unknown place and time where climate change is the underlying force. And yet, the result is a beautifully mysterious, wonderfully written, and *cohesive* novel that, it's safe to say, is unlike anything I've ever read. Since I'm familiar with Ellingsen's work, I've come to expect the unexpected; Not Dark Yet proves that she has a unique vision, one that will evolve the reader and change the way we understand the novel.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times, because I read incessantly, I grow weary of novels published by the major houses; novels that are written and released with the intention to reach a majority of readers and to sell. For palate cleansing I turn to books from indie publishers. Two Dollar Radio is such a one, run out of their home in Columbus, OH, by a husband and wife team. Berit Ellingsen is a Korean-Norwegian science writer and novelist who lives in Norway and writes in English. Not Dark Yet is her second novel.

A weird and wondrous novel it is. The first sentence: "Sometimes, in Brandon Minamoto's dreams, he found a globe or a map of the world with a continent he hadn't seen before." He has just left his boyfriend in the city and gone to live in a decrepit cabin in the mountains, seeking quiet. His military experiences and an incident when he felt forced to kill a research owl haunt him. Inner quiet and outer space are his quests. He hopes to be accepted into the space program as an astronaut.

His life in the cabin moves as slowly as a glacier through fall, winter, and early spring. In flash backs we learn his history and gradually come to realize that you wouldn't want this guy in a spaceship with you.

As a teen, he used to dream of a "round body of water the color of the sky" that echoes a fountain he had visited with his mother when he was a toddler.

During a visit to their paternal grandparents in Korea, he and his brother went to a shrine containing the relic of a monk who had been mummified after fasting to death. Then follows a story (from inside Brandon's mind?) of the monk's long and agonizing journey into the spirit world through starvation. Brandon's conclusion is "He wanted to be happy. What more does human life have to offer?"

Self-imposed loneliness, more dreams of a bodiless spirit nature, training his body to survive in space, and a brief foray into environmental terrorism follow. In a refreshing twist, this is not a post-apocalyptic novel but a pre-apocalyptic one. The awareness of climate change, melting ice, rising sea levels, violent storms, food shortages, and animals going extinct, permeate the story.

Written in close third person making you feel you are in Brandon's head, seeing with his eyes, feeling the cold, longing for space, this is a novel that might convince even a climate denier to have another look. Not since Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl have I experienced such an intense second sight meditation on where we are headed. Except that in Not Dark Yet, the elegant symmetry between one man's yearning and the demise of the entire race moves it several paces away from an eco thriller.

The tone is more like early J G Ballard. Deadpan recital of mundane daily events punctuated with explosions of disaster or Brandon's surreal dreams. I finished the book and could not leave the world she had created for hours. I cleaned the house and ordered Christmas presents. I tried to read another book. No go. This is why I read!

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars, of course! Loved it. Nobody writes like Berit Ellingsen.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting, very subtle novel, which is very different from what most readers will expect it to be. There's a lot of stillness and silence: a stark, coolly narrated depiction of a character retreating into self-imposed solitude, which (throughout the novel) also becomes the dismantling of his relationship with his boyfriend and his family. It's a difficult novel to read in some ways, though when I finished it, I realized I'd been misreading the earlier sections: that the stillness in this novel isn't the peace the character is looking for, but that's it's really an incomplete movement towards nothingness, which is maybe most pronounced in a long digression near the end where we see a monk mummifying himself, and this really fascinating moment where the character wishes he could have done that himself.

I struggled a lot with how Brandon treated his boyfriend in particular (who he intentionally distances himself from, but without making moves to communicate or end their relationship), though I don't think I realized until the last twenty pages how damaged the character is; and, at least for me, this is where the parallels with the environment come in, of irreparable damages that become impossible to come back from. This novel's treatment of climate change is fairly familiar, but it's very much in the background--and what we get (instead of a sort of cli-fi thriller, despite one point near the end where the novel briefly hints at becoming one) is this stark, subtle portrait of a failure to recover from emotional trauma... then the realization that, after what the character has been through, even moving away from other people isn't enough.

There's a sort of distant, calculated coolness to the narration, which segues very naturally into periods of dreamlike cosmic imagery. And this kind of distance is built into almost every part of Brandon: his relationship with his family and his boyfriend; to his own trauma; and even, moment to moment, to the story as it happens. It makes the book difficult to process in some ways, especially because this is a story about someone who destroys his life for the sake of a stillness that also doesn't satisfy him, one that never apologizes for itself or wants you to empathize with its characters--but it's also what makes it impressive. I think the last fifty pages are especially striking, and I particularly appreciate where the novel ends, in a place that's difficult but also feels very right.

[Julianne (Leafling Learns・Outlandish Lit) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll be real, I grabbed this book because of the pretty cover and the Jeff VanderMeer blurb on the back. Not Dark Yet is a new novella in the cli-fi (climate fiction) genre. The world's going to shit due to global warming. People are running out of food. The weather's all out of whack. And the main character, Brandon, just needs to get away from it all. So he moves to a remote cabin in the mountains somewhere, leaving his boyfriend behind. This novella jumps around in time a little bit covering a bunch of interesting plot points. An affair with a professor that goes bad, an agricultural project he joins in the mountains, applying to be an astronaut who will live on Mars, some random military stuff, AND MORE.

All of these things are SO interesting and the book had a lot of potential to do all sorts of stuff. Unfortunately, however, Brandon is just not that interesting of a guy. His character is so flat that it's hard to care about any of his (often briefly touched upon) plights. As much as I love concise books, I feel like Ellingsen could've done a lot with more pages. Anyway, I can't mention the other thing I didn't like because it would spoil the whole book. So in short, I really loved most of the stuff that went down in this story, I really super loved what the book was saying (it's so good), but I wasn't blown away with how it was done. If any of this sounds interesting to you, it's worth checking out, if only just to instagram the cover.

Full review: Outlandish Lit - 3 Dark & Weird Books of 2015

[deep]

PW Starred: This suspenseful and haunting novel follows ex-sniper Brandon Minamoto as he relocates from his unnamed North American city to a secluded cabin in the mountains. Brandon wants to find a clearer version of himself through self-imposed exile. His isolation conjures vivid dreams and memories of the world he is retreating from: his time in the military; his brother, Katsuhiro; and his lovers, Michael and Kaye. The story deepens, unfolding in short chapters that rise and fall like waves. Several strangers arrive at the cabin and ask to use some of Brandon's land for an unconventional agricultural project. After suffering an unexpected fall in the woods while running, Brandon visits a doctor and sees someone from his recent past. Meanwhile, he continues to advance in his application process to participate in a manned mission to Mars. The branches of these seemingly unconnected events begin to cross and merge, leading Brandon to major realizations. Ellingsen (Beneath Liquid Skin) projects a feeling of encroaching darkness on every page, "the shadow of a Kraken passing beneath the surface," and this tension guides the narrative like a purposeful current. Expansive and unsettling descriptions make it easy to fall under the story's spell. This is a remarkable novel from a very talented author. (Nov.)

[Andrew Finazzo · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started reading this novel blind (I got it as part of a Science Fiction bundle) and the most interesting bit was in the beginning when I was guessing what it might be about.

Ellingsen's writing style seemed to focus on intentionally confusing the reader by being unneccesarily circumspect. For example, Ellingsen tells us the main character's name in the first sentence of the book then refuses to repeat it again. We quickly become befuddled with sentences similar to these: "Bob bought a dog. He didn't like dogs." - with "He" being the main character and Bob being someone else. On a larger scale I didn't know if the story followed multiple characters and spent a long time trying to discern that (it doesn't).

On a larger scale the time and place of the novel is never directly revealed. This is tiresome since the driving force behind the plot is a preachily presented warning about the impact of global warming.

Plotlines come and go with no fanfare, time frames are jumbled for no apparent reason, and the book generally seems to be trying to feel mysterious by adding layers of intentional clunkiness.

[Angela Guay · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting read but none of the plot lines go anyway. It feels like 5 short stories smashed together with no real conclusion. I would have loved to see more depth, or the love story promised to me in the description... or anything promised in the description.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read an early version of this novel and absolutely loved it. I may add to this review later or write a new review closer to when it comes out.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

We are constantly reminded in this novel of climate change, dramatic drops in food production, and "alarming" rises in food prices. And yet there are quite a few mentions of characters eating beef as if it's nothing special. In such an environment, surely everyday beef consumption would be one of the first things to disappear?

I too am not a fan of the accumulation of throwaway detail here, already mentioned in some of the earlier reviews.

[Rob Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enigmatic, oddly moving. Now that I've finished I'm not quite sure where it all led me to, but I enjoyed the trip.

[Matt R · Rating 1 out of 5]

One Star
There were some interesting ideas scattered throughout this book.
I liked the dream sequences, I liked the not-naming where it was set, I liked the early flashback to the military, I liked the focus on the issue of climate change.
My fondness and interest in these ideas was pushing me towards a 2 star rating.

However, I did not enjoy reading it, and I am wondering why the author did not get some more guidance and feedback to polish this up a bit.
After careful consideration, I have no choice but to award only a single star rating.

You can read my thoughts in detail below:


Brandon who?
The technique of naming the protagonist only in the first sentence did not work for me at all.
"Brandon Minamoto" is ditched after the opening line and he is referred to as "he", "him", "his" for the rest of the book. Other male characters are referred to only by their name (or an identifying label such as "the assistant professor") and never by "he", "him" or "his". This is extremely annoying and makes it difficult to read. It serves no purpose other than a cutesy little trick. Brandon is never called by his name by any of the other characters. What is the point in giving him a name? The only explanation I can think of is that this started off in first person in an early draft.


Brandon the Boring
Brandon, as a character is boring. He has some backstory, some dislikes and likes, has some sort of ambition to be an astronaut. But he is very flat. He is not interesting. I didn't really care what happened to him.


Too Much Description
There is way too much description of objects - their colour, their material, their shape, their size, their placement in relation to other objects. It is all needless filler. Give your readers some room to use their imaginations! Just say "his bedroom" and be done with it. "The cabin." End of. I don't want to know anymore, unless it's relevant to what happens (it's not, by the way.) There is too much description of action. The book is full of paragraphs like this:

"Matt typed the keys to write words for his review. He typed the keys by moving his fingers across the keyboard and pressing a finger down on a key. The key would go down into the computer, register the press, and the letter would appear on the screen. He pressed the spacebar every time he needed to leave a gap between a word. He would hold down the shift key to make a capital letter, usually at the start of a sentence. He would think of the words in his head first, before typing them out, and then read them back to check it made sense and that he was happy with it."

It is boring. It is painful. All you need to do is write this: "Matt wrote his review."

This book could/should have been a short story of 3o pages maximum. Because there are large sections where nothing happens of any interest or significance.


Plot Is Too Wide And Shallow
There are several plot threads that don't really go deep enough or have any sort of conflict. They just trundle along, stuffed with their paragraphs of description. I wonder whether the author started off with three or four ideas and decided to mash them together rather than cut out the less interesting ones.


The Dialogue Is Irrelevant
Dialogue is hard to get right all the time. I rarely find a writer who can satisfy my need for excellent dialogue. I always find something off with it, something awkward or unrealistic. However, the dialogue in this book is really stale. Every character speaks in the same way. The dialogue is not used for any sort of conflict, drama or humour. I can't remember a single thing a character said that will stick with me. It was the calibre of "How are you?" "I am fine, how are you?" "I am well, thanks for asking." This book was not alive with people, it was filled with robots.


I Skimmed The Last 50 Pages
I never, ever do this with a book. I like to take my time and savour every sentence. However, I realised, with this book, because of the way it was written, I could just read the first sentence of each paragraph and not miss out on anything. I employed this technique for the last quarter, just to save myself the pain of experiencing all of the above.


How To Fix It
This honestly felt like a first draft. It needs rewriting from start to finish. I am sure there is a story worth salvaging amongst these pages. I'd start by cutting out 80% of the "words" that are doing no work whatsoever, other than describing objects and rooms. Remove all the dialogue. Draft some scenes of conflict between characters. Give Brandon some meaningful challenges. Name Brandon on every page, or change it (back?) to first person.

[Jared]

If you were fortunate enough to know of Vandermeer Mixtape via Storybundle, as I was, you may have been lucky enough to get your hands on Berit Ellingsen's wonderful Not Dark Yet. If not, grab it and read it right now.

Not Dark Yet is a quiet and dark and cold story, but none of these to an extent that punishes the reader. It's about love, but not necessarily romantic. About family, but not gratuitously tragic the way literary fiction can be. (Although speculative fiction may be more apt, given the exaggerated sense of environmental danger occurring around the characters). It's about the forces of nature, and climate change--its ultimate, creeping power over us, our decisions, our past and future. Science is a powerful recurring character in this book: growing crops in mild winters, environmentalists, Brandon's desire to go into space. All handled with an understated prose that's never stale and sometimes starkly beautiful.

The protagonist's name is mentioned once, in the first line, and for the rest of the story, Ellingsen only uses "he." I never confused him with other male characters, and had this sense of the story moving in one, continuous stream, despite multiple subplots.

One scene that stands out to me: Brandon dreams of being on a cruise ship as it crashes. Of that particular and familiar horror, being in a violent dream and being unable to escape it as it happens, knowing cataclysmic danger is coming but being powerless against it, and it's all so personal, felt like a wonderful metaphor for how the character felt at this point in the book.

"But no life boats were lowered, no life jackets hurled into the still water, no mayday sent out, because they were all there voluntarily, enjoying the sight of the jetstam going down and thanking the multitude gods that it wasn't them."

Ultimately, I read this as a book about ghosts, and light in the face of them. It would be easy to say it's a climate change story and leave it there, but Brandon has so much more to him than that. It's about the world we build for ourselves. The signs of danger we see decades before they become actual problems, the reasons we act as we do even when we know we shouldn't. It's a book about hope, even when a hurricane destroys the work you've done in the autumn of your life.

Not Dark Yet was the first book I read in 2016, and comes highly recommended.

[Lola Tarantula · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars, half a star for the cover design.

At some point within the first twenty pages of this book, I seriously wondered if this book was a parody of something. The purple prose and liberal use of hyphenated adjectives was so over the top I was convinced that I was missing some kind of important point that would justify it. I probably should have stopped reading then, but I did not. I can't say that I finished it, or even came closer to the end than the beginning, but I couldn't physically bring myself to slog through another page of pointless description. It was unpleasant to read, not challenging or grammar bending in the style of McCarthy or Atwood, despite the obvious influence their works had on this novel.

The fatal flaw in Not Dark Yet is the prose. This book reads like a high school English project, wherein the student was told to 'be as descriptive as possible' and given a thesaurus to do with as they may without holding back. There were points where I had to stop and shake my head at whatever I had just read. The phrase "The kitchen was illumined by a rectangular window above the sink" is used early on, and I'm still shook. I have since erased the word illumined from my vocabulary and hope to never see it again in any context.

Absolutely nothing is left up to the reader and it was as though the author believed that unless the character was described walking across the room every time he did so we, the readers, would only assume he teleported there. This book is poorly written from a technical standpoint but also fails to create any lasting impressions. The characters are weak, as is the plot, and the flowery prose only makes Not Dark Yet come across as trying too hard to be a work of literature rather than a story. I'm not usually this harsh, but this was just too much. If you're going to write something in the style of a Harlequin romance, at least make it fun to read.

[jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange little book. I'm left thinking about how our lives become the sum of our reactions to trauma? And something something something about global warming and space travel being intertwined..... I don't know.

Are you the sort of person who would, say, blow up a power plant to stop the production of greenhouse gases? Or are you the sort of person who would seek a new home on another planet; perhaps you'd like to help terraform Mars? We can all grapple with these types of questions, but we rarely have to answer them.

[idle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aimless.

What I liked about the book: the writing itself was fine, and I appreciated that the ending was in line with the whole story, it fitted there.

What I didn't like: the unbalanced amount of details. Too much description of unimportant things (the whole inventory of a room we're just passing through, etc.), while the whole setting was deliberately vague - no continent/country/town names, the main character is just a "he". It felt forced and I didn't see the point.

The rest mostly left me unimpressed. The "he" buys a cabin in the countryside and applies to a space program, but altought there's a bit of a flashback, we have no idea why he ever does what he does. No thoughts, no motivation, no anticipation. The days just pass by. This is probably intentional, but at the same time it failed to make me interested in his story at all.

I almost didn't finish it. Because it's message seems to be: what's the point?

[Carrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is not good. Not one believable character or relationship, not one plot line fully explored, not one broader point about climate change cohesively or effectively argued. Another reviewer said this read like fanfic, and I completely agree. This is the first book I've read published by this press, a pretty successful indie press in Columbus, Ohio. This book was published in 2015, so hopefully as the press has grown and gained respect as a legitimate player in book publishing, its editors have started to see better writing find its way to their slush pile.

Two stars and not one because there were a couple plot lines I was actually interested in the first half of the book, but the closer I got to the end, the more disgruntled I got with the writing.

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

This should be called DARK, more appropriately, because the lights are on and no one's home. I felt terribly cheated by this slight novel. It wasn't like it was long enough to be super offensive, but I don't think length should be synonymous with lark. As a result? Well, that was all rather pointless, really.

I've read a bazillion other things that told the exact same story, but told it with more interest and 3D characters, making this ho-hum at best, preachy at worst. I'd stay IN THE DARK and skip it, if I were you.

[Meghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this readable near-future quasi-dystopia, and it's a slim attractive book. A military veteran moves to a cabin, leaving his boyfriend back in the city. Others living near the cabin are trying to convert mountain bogs into wheat fields, which they can do because of climate change. There are chapters of how he came to this place, including time spent as a photographer at a research university, where he took photos of owls being used as research subjects. I would describe the mood as quietly dark but graceful.

[Helen McClory · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quietly powerful book about an emotionally distant man in a dislocated world on the brink of environmental collapse. The detail - to the point of excess - serves to add to the sense of an echoing world of things and bare sensation. Though it moves slowly, the journey is not at all a predictable one, and the ending, when it comes, punches hard.

[Ryan Bradford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like if Le Carre wrote a "Man vs. Nature" story. Ellingsen's writing is meticulous and direct, which gives this book an underlying, ominous tension that kind of makes you hold your breath as you read it.

[Colton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had some interesting concepts, but it was so slow and boring and cold that I was eventually drained of all interest. It's a short book, but it still felt really padded and turgid. Beautiful cover, though.

[Simon Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting, meticulous, and beautifully written. I love this book.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughts to come but for now, "huh." And "wow."

[Matrix · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nothing happens in this book and it goes absolutely nowhere. A complete bore...

[Maven_Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen tells the story of Brandon Minamoto, a former military sniper who retreats to a remote cabin in the mountains to escape his past only to be drawn into a fragile community grappling with climate change, activism, and the pull of something larger than himself. Through his memories, dreams, and a quietly unfolding present, Brandon confronts the trauma of his previous life, a failed romance, and the strange entanglements of a near-future world reshaped by warming temperatures.

From the very first moments, Ellingsen’s prose felt like water, calm on the surface but currents tugging underneath. When Brandon isolates himself, I felt both peaceful and uneasy, as if his solitude was a balm and a burden all at once. The novel moves in gentle waves: short chapters ebb and flow with flashbacks to his military service, his complicated relationships with Michael and Kaye, and haunting episodes from his youth, even the memory of killing a research animal. His escape isn’t just physical; it’s spiritual: he dreams of distant continents, yearns for other worlds, and applies for a manned mission to Mars. Meanwhile, the people near his cabin are planning an audacious agricultural project, cultivating land now fertile because of climate shifts in a quietly optimistic response to the global crisis.

What stayed with me was how Ellingsen doesn’t sensationalize the apocalypse but treats it as a gentle, creeping transformation. The environmental stakes feel all too real, but it’s Brandon’s inner life, his longing, his passivity, his moments of connection and withdrawal that carries the emotional weight. As he interacts with his neighbors, reflects on his past, and grapples with loss, I found myself rooting for him even when he almost willingly blends into the landscape around him. Critics have noted that the novel operates more as a series of meditative tableaux than as a fast-paced plot, and I’d agree, sometimes the stillness feels like a strength, drawing you into a raw sense of vulnerability.

I finished this book feeling tender, unsettled, and quietly hopeful. Brandon’s journey isn’t dramatic in the usual way, but it resonated deeply, as a reflection on identity, belonging, and what it means to build meaning in a changing world.

Rating: 4 out of 5. I say four because while the prose is beautiful and the themes are rich, the pacing is deliberately slow, and some readers might find the weightless moments a little too drifting. But for me, that languid quality was part of the book’s power, it allowed space to feel and reflect.

[Shadoshard · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was very hard for me to get through. I understood where it was trying to go but it was too ephemeral for me. And scattered. I couldn't get a good fix on the personalities of any of these characters and the shifts in time were confusing. There were shifts that didn't make sense or identify who they belonged to. We know the main subject wanted to be an astronaut but there was so little to anchor for the character to that ideal - the book tells you it is what he wants so - he's in a back water to help him - do it? And a farming project? They could have been made plausibly tied together but that isn't how it went and it didn't keep enough of my attention to make me want to draw the connections myself. But what annoys me is that there was enough promise of the book that - at times - I wanted to.

[Allie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A slow burn, but a satisfying one, Not Dark Yet combines a lot of my favorite things - failed romances, a longing for a science fictional future that never materialized, beautiful descriptions of an increasingly fragile natural world, and, of course, owls. While it didn't completely knock my socks off, it's a solid winter read from the always reliable Two Dollar Radio press.

[Teodor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written and haunting work that draws you in unawares... Ellingsen writes about spaces and non-spaces and the deeper in you go the less certain you become about which is which. Boundaries between the human and non-human, the organic and inorganic dissolve, in what is a "climate change novel" that managed to burrow itself into the subconscious.