PleasureTemple

Review of The Twilight Tsunami

Shelby Londyn-Health’s debut novel The Twilight Tsunami reveals her originality, a passionate voice given equally to beauty and ugliness. Her unapologetic prose carries readers through peoples’ affirmative actions towards rescuing wretched souls such as the four-year-old toddler bouncing through nine different foster homes in a lifetime of four summers, a neglected thirteen-year-old experiencing traumatic events with no clear picture of a future, and a passionate caregiver with no safeguards for her personal life─ suffering frightful upheavals from the foster care system.

While Londyn-Heath attempts to explore the intense dynamics between a power hungry supervisor and her subordinates, she brings into the scene a large cast of characters—interesting with strange behaviors, sometimes funny and at other times gloomy—constituting the story’s most vibrant chapters. For sure, we see in this story fragmented sketches of characters struggling with one thing or the other, or multiple opposing forces competing to make the world a better place for a teddy-hugging toddler wandering through multiple foster homes. We also meet compassionate foster parents and brave empathy-filled social workers standing up to change the foster care system. Consider a social worker struggling with her job of removing children:

“She knew Dwight was drifting on The Titanic of social services. Often, foster children sat in parks waiting for visits with their parents. They waited under pavilions in heat, cold, and rain. They waited for parents who were too high to remember to come.”

These children find themselves suddenly and incomprehensibly drawn into a confusing world, sometimes passively and at other times aggressively— into a system voracious and indifferent to their youthful limits of tolerance.  Londyn-Heath writes about a mother giving up her child to a social worker named Karen:

“On this day, she was calm as she quietly handed her baby to Karen. The baby slept. Easy. As Karen approached her car, she heard a pop like the sound of a firecracker. The police officer walking with her turned and instinctively grabbed his gun and pointed it at the house. He yelled at everyone to hit the ground.”

Londyn-Heath manages to locate in her society’s anguished consciousness a kind of terror a great majority of us conveniently deny with open eyes. She has put evil in perspective, not in order to understand it, but to affirm its inexplicable inevitability in human society. One of the most elusive offenders of humanity is the absence of empathy. Through her prose, I realized one thing─when a society is sandwiched between two opposing forces of the universe—good and evil, the latter competes for supremacy over the former, then someone must triumph over both with wiser thoughts and judicious actions.

For some readers, though, this story might be disturbing─a painful allegory of drugs, violence, jealousy and despair. But I dare say—you would be utterly mistaken. For most who understand what constitutes a systemic problem and its ramifications across society, The Twilight Tsunami will go down as a courageous effort at strengthening the fifth pillar of democracy. I define Literature as the fifth pillar of democracy, because a truly democratic state relies on the narrative of its observant society.

Sidd Burth
22 October, 2018