Rejecting, embracing, surviving: Sim Kern’s ‘Depart, Depart!’
Sim Kern’s novella Depart, Depart! is deep and full of hope. Some readers are already aware that they would love to find climate fiction with a transgender main character and a Jewish ghost. Those who do not already know this about their own literary tastes should pick up the book and allow themselves to be persuaded.
Houston has already flooded as the story opens. A powerful hurricane has swept through, and the dam burst. Noah had lived in a queer neighborhood there, but now he’s in an emergency shelter for evacuees. It’s impossible to know yet how many hundreds of thousands people, and exactly who, might have died. But Noah has survived.
Raised by atheists and having taken psychology courses, Noah is inclined to believe that his visions of his great-grandfather as a seven-year-old boy in knickerbockers are a “stress-induced hallucination.” He tells himself: “There’s no such thing as god or ghosts. No life after death.”
But it was the ghost who told him to seek higher ground. And wasn’t that good advice?
In navigating the shelter system, Noah decides to stick with his new queer friends. They are people of various genders in various stages of transition, and they are subject to rude stares from the other Texans. As hurricane refugees, they have little privacy in…
