Saltcrop
Yume Kitasei
Hardcover/ebook/audiobook
ISBN: 978-1250380968
Flatiron Books, September 2025, 400 pgs.

Saltcrop is the story of three sisters, Skipper, Carmen, and Nora, who grew up in a small island town, reading, fishing, and repairing a battered sailboat they named the Bumblebee. It’s the kind of town that belongs in a bucolic, pre-Internet American coming-of-age novel—except this is the near-future, where there’s no social media because it costs so much to use the Internet, and all the fishing and foraging happens because constant blights and crop failures keep people on the edge of starvation. The nation’s food supply is completely dependent on Renewal, a giant agri-chemical corporation whose engineered seeds are grown in tandem with its miracle fungicide.

Now adults, the three sisters have difficult relationships, rendered tougher by the fact that Nora moved to a distant city for college and now works for Renewal. But when Nora goes missing, the sisters set out to find her. They’re unprepared for the web of mystery Nora has gotten tangled in, and find themselves sailing through dangerous waters, encountering corporate spies, union organizers, cannibalistic pirates, and a world ravaged by climate change.

Each sister gets her own point-of-view section in the novel, giving each character a very believable story arc while painting a more nuanced and fuller image of the family. It’s really enjoyable to contrast each sister’s inner life with the other sisters’ preconceptions about them. For example, the youngest sister, Skipper, loves sailing and fixing things, but struggles socially, and sees Carmen as a social butterfly who puts everyone else before her family. Skipper also thinks of Nora as “the smart one,” and worries she’s not interesting enough to care about. When the novel switches from Skipper’s perspective to Carmen’s, we learn how much Carmen admires Skipper’s casual physical competence, and we see that Carmen compares her intellect to Nora’s just the same way Skipper does. If you have siblings, you will really appreciate the way these sisters struggle with each other even as they love each other intensely.

Kitasei does a terrific job developing this complex family dynamic against a background of slowly ratcheting tension. What begins as something of a near-future travelogue whirls into an SF thriller where danger lurks in every shadow. Much of the action takes place in claustrophobic conditions, from the Bumblebee’s shabby cabin to a Waterworld-esque drilling platform-turned-town to a corporate-occupied Svalbard global seed vault. These isolated and enclosed spaces dial up the intensity of the sisters’ peril and fill the reader with more and more anxiety.

All of that anxiety is further worsened by the incredible believability of the story. There’s no date mentioned in this novel, but the time feels closer to our own than anyone would like it to. Drowned cities used to feel like far-out science fiction, but as seawall expansion projects are unrolled around the United States—like the Central Texas Project hoping to protect the port of Galveston, and the Living Seawall Pilot sheltering the port of San Francisco—ocean rise is no longer science fictional. Agricultural scientists are already warning us that warmer temperatures raise the risk of fungal blights and viral plant infections which will impact every major crop on the planet. Corporations are already taking advantage of struggling farmers and crushing opposition to their economic dominance. The future described in Saltcrop feels more like tomorrow than the next century.

All that danger and suffering could make Saltcrop a depressing read, but it’s not. No matter where the sisters go, human ingenuity shines. While big agri-tech might claim to offer the only solutions in a struggling world, we see character after character making do and inventing new ways to survive or even thrive. You can’t help rooting for all the plucky people the sisters meet. Some people might call Saltcrop a solarpunk novel, and if the genre is defined by this fantastic book, then we should all be reading it.

Yume Kitasei has created a work that somehow blends the dystopic with the cozy, the bildungsroman with the thriller, and the family story with the science fictional. It’s smart, warmhearted science fiction that compels you to think about the state of the world. If you’ve read Ray Nayler’s work and then wanted a hug, this is the book for you. If you have a big sister and wonder what you’d do to save her, then this is doubly for you.

Ten out of ten bumblebees, and all the thumbs up.