Onward - (Hardcover)

About the Book

Sixteen short stories highlight how climate change affects everyone and how activism and action can help curb the global crisis.

Book Synopsis

A collection of 16 remarkable short stories for aspiring teen activists centered on the climate crisis, highlighting how small actions can make Earth sustainable against climate change.

Young adult powerhouse authors such as Erin Entrada Kelly and Jeff Zentner come together in this anthology of speculative, dystopian, and contemporary realistic fiction.

This inspiring collection of sixteen short stories is packed with fascinating characters and settings that illuminate current and possible changes to our planet and how humanity responds.

Included here is prose, verse, and personal essays from a wide range of authors diverse in ethnic background, geographic location, and socioeconomic status. A few tales:

• Shayta cares for a tiny green plant in a futuristic world where Earth has become a barren, over-farmed landscape fraught with dirt storms.
• Hana and her father travel by catamaran to the farthest place from land in the entire world--only to discover a giant, floating carcass of trash and a few other surprises.
• William and his family want to protect an endangered fish from a potential dam on a river that's flowed through their land for generations . . .

There's also a section where readers can find concrete and practical steps to help curtail the global climate crisis, including resources specific for every story. There's even a section specifically "For the Severely Overwhelmed."

This young adult anthology cultivates deep hope and stunning resilience--what we all need in order to make life on Earth more sustainable for us all.

"Whether you are feeling hopeful or frustrated about the climate crisis (or somewhere in-between), Onward: 16 Climate Fiction Short Stories to Inspire Hope is a captivating example of how the power of story can build resilience, activate hope, uncover blind spots and unstick us from our complacency. The fear and anger many of us feel right now is matched with equal humor, insight and beauty in this diverse collection of stories."
--Naisa Beaumont, environmental scientist and children's writer

Review Quotes

In this wide-ranging collection of poems, short stories, and an essay, climate change is explored in ways that are meant to inspire hope rather than despair, encouraging readers toward activism and a resistance against the rapid destruction and consumption of Earth's resources. The characters are sharp and bold across multiple genres in this anthology of sixteen works, and each is able to see what needs to be done even if some are still coming to understand how they can be part of a solution. In "The Care and Feeding of Mother" by Erin Entrada Kelly, characters painstakingly grow a small plant from real seeds and real soil--amid a world in which nature is made up of trademarked replications of what once was, this becomes an act of hope and resistance. Jeff Zentner's "Tellico Lake" is a verse story that follows a young boy and the real-life fight to keep a dam from being built in the Tennessee Valley in the 1970s when the presence of small, endangered fish grants the area a (temporary) stay of demolition. A brief foreword explores how the younger generation, perched on the edge of an environmental cliff, has responded to a tenuous future, with reactions ranging from ferocious determination to resigned apathy. The stories nudge toward the former, even while acknowledging that it can be hard to hold optimism while the world burns. There is a rich diversity of writing styles, voices, and perspectives that keeps the collection fresh and each entry distinct, though all adhere to the central theme. Brief author notes and a list of resources will be part of the final version.
--The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

About the Author

Nora Shalaway Carpenter is the contributing editor of the critically acclaimed YA short story anthology Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America. Her debut YA novel The Edge of Anything was named a Bank Street Best Book, a Kirkus Reviews Best book, and A Mighty Girl Best Book of the Year.