“River Reflects Earth” by Anne M. Smith-Nochasak

“I am Flo.

I will never submit.”

Oh, how these words made my heart beat faster! I felt the surge of adrenaline that members of the resistance in the Taggak Journey trilogy must have felt. The motivation they sorely needed to keep moving towards their goal, despite the cold and the hunger and the despair squeezing their souls in a merciless vise.

But apart from all that, I simply am a huge fan of the rebel grandmother Flo, and I am always glad to ‘meet’ her on the pages.

I was looking forward to the final instalment of the Taggak Journey trilogy, knowing that the author would wrap up the story in a well-deserving manner. I was right. Anne M. Smith-Nochasak has provided her readers with a most satisfying finale; one that ties all the significant threads while at the same time giving us food for further reflection.

“River Reflects Earth” begins with Luke, formerly Andrea, rocking the boat of comradeship by allowing doubts in the leadership of the resistance. She doesn’t share these doubts with others. Instead, she lets them churn inside, poisoning her with suspicion and rage. That the people she is travelling with see through her only makes it worse. Not abandoning her faith in River and in the rightness of the Last Battle, determined to perform the entrusted duty of the chronicler of revolution, Luke walks to the den of the vicious Elect, or, more precisely, trudges forth. She isn’t special. She is neither one of the Shadows nor endowed with the gift of seeing the future. She was a veterinarian in her former life, before the dystopian chaos had wiped out everything everyone had ever known. And now she is a chronicler of revolution. She might not seem as important as its fighters, or as the almost magical Six, or Alexa King – that bloody old woman on whom the whole resistance depends as on the Bible in better, easier days… Be that as it may, Luke is not going to give up. She will walk together with the group until the very end, no matter how this end turns out to be for all of them. After all, if they succeed, someone must have the story recorded to pass to the next generations. And that’s Luke’s job. No, it is her mission. And she will make sure to see it through. If the Elect won’t kill them all, that is.

The third book of the series is as much a depiction of a physical journey as it is a chronicle of other facets inherent to any expedition whose goal is broader than simply reaching a destination. Together with resistance members, we travel down their memory lanes, learning how life has shaped them into the people who joined the revolution against the tyrannical Elect. All of them have nothing to lose but can give the Earth everything to gain.

Luke reflects on the Emissary, the leader of the sect ruling over the surviving part of mankind, “For him, the Last Battle would be a minor inconvenience in a comfortable afternoon, after which he would return to his couch to enjoy whatever plunder remained until the world ran empty.” These words struck me as being true not only in the fictional dystopian setting but in general. Any event, be it a war they initiated or a financial crisis caused by the crashing of global markets, means something different to those in the power echelons than to regular citizens. While presidents and their entourage board their luxury aircrafts, which would take off on demand irrespective of fuel prices, some families would be forced to cancel their one-week annual foreign travel plans, move to a more modest accommodation or worse.

I appreciated the realism of this dystopian tale and the true-to-life characters, some of whom poignantly represent familiar archetypes. The journey that the assorted group of those who didn’t give up have taken against logic and self-preservation instinct, pushing aside the personal for the sake of the common good, will stay with me. As will the lessons they have learnt along the way, the most important of them probably being that a victory doesn’t necessarily have to be neat to be meaningful.