Reviewed by Eden Ridout
There’s a particular kind of unease that Vanessa Frances’ Orange Island leaves—the sort that doesn’t feel borrowed from fiction but pulled from tomorrow’s headlines. It’s a techno-dystopian, speculative fiction novel—technically—but calling it dystopian almost feels like a misdirection. The world here isn’t some far-flung, irrational nightmare; it’s ours, our TV stuck on breaking news and climate projections with the volume turned to max, forcing you to notice.
Frances writes mid twenty-first century Florida as a place both swiftly sinking and stubbornly alive, all heat and rot and fluorescent promise. Wealth and scarcity don’t just coexist—they press against each other uncomfortably. The last few trees linger behind the fences of the wealthy. A family Disney trip begins and ends in the parking lot: $100 to leave your car to bake in the sun, $600 each to enter a fantasy you cannot afford. Artificially intelligent robots take up menial labor jobs for those who can swing the funds to employ them. Implants are available to do smart technology services like texting and news updates and those without them are at a significant and risky for emergency alert notifications. Those who cannot afford to live on campus—most people—reminisce on the lifestyle of 2020 pandemic students by attending lectures through an impersonal and still debt-causing virtual system.
What Orange Island understands—quietly, infuriatingly, and devastatingly all at once—is that good, immersive dystopia isn’t built on spectacle. It is built on compliance. People adapt. They swallow the bitterness (sometimes literally), tell themselves it’s normal, keep moving. Tell each other that registering to vote is the most radical act they can engage in and fear monger anything larger by insisting you add your face to a government registration in order to participate. Much like in real life, the systems don’t need to be hidden because no one has the time, money, or energy to meaningfully resist them. The novel is less interested in rebellion than in the slow, grinding acceptance that makes rebellion feel impossible.
Orange Island doesn’t ask whether this future is possible. It assumes you’re already living in its early draft—and dares you to recognize it.
The center of all this is Savannah and her older sister, Dove. Their sisterhood surpasses obligation despite their thirteen-year age gap. It serves more as a lifeline in the hurricane tearing through their home: their mom’s death, their overworked and out-of-touch dad, the collapsing world around them. Dove is now memory, a promise, and absence all at once—sharp and lingering citrus through her journal entries, a cat, and the new inhibitor of her old room even thirteen years after they find her and her boyfriend’s body in the river. Dove was bright. A protector of the most vulnerable. Despite being deeply grounded in reality and her own gut instincts, she still had hope for a better future. Even after death, her essence saturated her sister and, by extension, the novel.
Plot-wise, the book moves less like a straight line and more like a current you’re caught in. Savannah grows up in the aftermath of loss that never fully settles, piecing together what her family’s origins are and, more importantly, who her sister was and what happened to her through what’s been left behind. As she edges further into adulthood, the world around her tightens—economically, environmentally, politically—until even small decisions carry weight.
Encounters that seem incidental at first begin to accumulate, pulling at the edges of what she thought she understood about her family, her circumstances, and the systems shaping both. There’s no single grand twist or clean unraveling; instead, the story builds through pressure, through quiet revelations and uneasy recognitions, until the question isn’t just what happened, but what it means to keep going with that knowledge.
As a debut novel, Orange Island feels unusually assured about what it is doing and how it wants to be read. In my opinion, it sits somewhere between literary realism and speculative fiction, borrowing the slow attention to detail and interiority of realism while layering in just enough speculative elements to sharpen, rather than distract from, that focus. The book’s “contract” with the reader is not one of escape or even resolution. It asks for patience, for attention to small shifts, for a willingness to sit inside discomfort without the promise of release. This isn’t a story driven by twists or spectacle, but by accumulation—of pressure, of memory, of quiet recognitions that land heavier the longer you sit with them. It expects you to notice what the characters are forced to accept, and to feel the weight of that gap.
*The publisher of Orange Island (Red Rook Press) and Call Me [Brackets] are both affiliated with the University of Alabama Department of English