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Synopsis of Iglu

The rising sea has swallowed up most of the Iñupiaq people’s native land and millions of Americans from the lower forty-eight are being relocated to Alaska due to the devastation from global warming. But when the Iñupiaq people rise up to fight for the survival of their culture, the private army Skyhawk is brought in to subdue the growing insurgency and the Iñupiaq rebels are labeled as terrorists. Separated from her family in the aftermath of the ensuing battle, fourteen-year-old April Ipalook desperately searches for a place of refuge amidst the war zone of northern Alaska.

Excerpt from Iglu

"April crept through the empty lot where she and her sister used to play before the war. A felled tree with an axe stuck in its trunk lay across the dead grass; half its bark had been shaved off and the peelings were piled up in a wheelbarrow as if someone had left in the middle of the job. April ran her hand along the trunk of the spruce tree. It was rare to see a fallen tree of this size abandoned. The tree line had only reached Point Hope forty years ago after the last of the permafrost had melted and the tundra had given way to stunted forests of spruce and alder. April loved to sit against the trunks and read or just stare up into the branches; but her father always reminded her that although global warming had brought the trees, it had taken most of the Iñupiat’s land and the animals they depended on.

‘You see beauty in the branches and leaves,’ he would say. ‘But to me the trees are like gravestones for the ways of our people.’

April wanted so badly to lie down next to the felled trunk and rest; but hunger drove her on.”