Jeff Vandermeer's HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER

What if William Gibson wrote a fourth book in the Bigend trilogy, but left out Bigend and just focused on its weird questing structure through a world that's 20 minutes into the future while also making it a little bit of a Jackpot story? What if Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road, but started the story a little while before the hopeless devastation? What if Margaret Atwood wrote a fourth Maddaddam book but used an actually tough woman with actual agency as her heroine?

What if Jeff Vandermeer wrote a novel recognizably set in our world?

Ladies, Gentlemen and Enbies, Hummingbird Salamander.

Herein we meet a character we will only know as Jane, a high level security consultant with a messed-up past in the form of an abusive grandfather, a gently but sadly mentally ill mother, a barely-there nothing of a father, and a devastatingly handsome older brother who gets away with too much mischief for his own good. Jane was the baby of the family, but quickly grew into its mountain, a huge and powerfully strong, physically imposing woman who had a brief wrestling career before drifting into security -- growing up with the family she did meant she had all the requisite skills for that, including talent with firearms and the fearlessness needed to use it.

As we meet her, she's at the top of her game, able to pick her own assignments, seemingly happily married to a man who seems physically to be her exact counterpart, raising a teenaged daughter and losing touch with her in that sad and wistful way that mothers and teenage daughters almost always lose touch... and then one day a barista at her habitual coffee shop hands her a mysterious note from a mysterious (and recently deceased) woman she's never heard of, that gives her directions to begin a mysterious quest that will send her careening all over California (with a brief side trip to New York), break her family to pieces, put her in the line of fire of every kind of firearm known to man, bury her briefly in a pile of taxidermied animals (what is it with this year and people hiding inside piles of dead animals in literature? Stephen Graham-Jones had one of his heroines doing it, too), almost burn her alive and basically live the nightmare life of the unwilling participant in an espionage thriller, all while uncovering a plot to maybe save earth's dwindling natural ecosystems as the human world that's all but destroyed them starts collapsing.

But never once does Jane despair or feel sorry for herself. This lady is tough, smart and competent as hell. It's actually a pleasure seeing her get herself out of impossible situations even as we share her self-disgust at falling for ruses or incorrectly interpreting the very cryptic (we're talking digits written on the insides of the glass eyes from a taxidermy animal levels of cryptic) clues or not noticing secret doors the first time around.

And yet somehow all of this ends on kind of a hopeful note, even as Jane lays down, possibly to die, after watching everything she loved or even sort of cared about crash and burn around her; what she has learned about the mysterious woman who arranged for her to get that fateful note, that woman's relationship to her own family and wreck of a childhood, and the titanic and mad project the woman had concocted to give Nature a second chance has let her hope, and that lets us hope, too.

But, of course, there isn't a real life counterpart of that mysterious woman; we've had too many examples of what actual people who control the kind of resources this one did in Hummingbird Salamander actually choose to do with them, and it's not great. But maybe, just maybe, one of them will stumble across this book and get a better idea? Or something?