Wonder Valley: A Novel

"Wonder Valley starts and ends on a freeway. Just like everything in Los Angeles, right? Ivy Pochoda’s imaginative characters are just as complicated as this megalopolis, too. I can’t decide if that’s why I liked the book so much, or if it was the pretty clear dystopian themes (a favorite genre for me), even though it’s set in the not-so-distant past. Everyone in Wonder Valley – from Ren, who takes a bus west from Brooklyn to look for his mom on Skid Row to Patrick, a self-proclaimed healer who runs a chicken farm in the Mojave Desert – has their own complications and struggles. And no one ends up being who you initially think they are … kind of like Los Angeles."