Probably It Will Not Be Okay — Breka Blakeslee

The tenth book in the Fellow Travelers Series, ‘Probably It Will Not Be Okay’ takes place at the end of the anthropocene. People and animals, what’s left of them, share the ruins of a human city, a benign surveillance democracy that celebrates protest and domesticity. N & J, a couple fond of whiskey, cigarettes, and breaking into abandoned buildings, must bury their dead dog and raise a baby that appears in their house. Fleeing hazy fears, N & J drive away from the city as far as a car can take them, bringing the baby and the decaying dog through a series of misadventures that ends by a fence at the edge of surveillance. They and the baby crawl under the fence — and then the book reverses itself, like a movie run backward, to tell the story of Dog, a young person who, some time later, climbs back under the fence with a talking sloth, tracing a route back to “the first home” and the sloth’s destiny.

‘Probably It Will Not Be Okay’  (the first novel of a young Seattle writer, Breka Blakeslee) is a strange, beguiling palindrome of a book with an ending unlike any other in fiction, an ending that is also the beginning of hope and optimism.