Okay – here we go … it’s time for Six Degrees of Separation hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best and followed by many.  🙂  

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)  is Kate’s starter book so thank you, Kate.  I read this back in 1999 or so  (?) and that blog was terminated long ago. Anyway Smith’s book is set in a dilapidated old English castle with two destitute sisters struggling in many ways.  

Into the Forest by Jean Hegland  (1966) –
Smith’s book reminds me so much of Into the Forest that I sometimes conflate the two even if they’re really quite different.  The Hegland book has two sisters temporarily home alone in the redwood forests of Northern California. While their parents are gone the world is rendered out-of-order by a super-massive power-failure – now everyone is “off the grid” because there is no grid. The girls (ages 12 and 15?) are permanently stranded. These two books are both about sisters coming-of-age in the countryside and in serious poverty.  One set of sisters has parents there while the other set of parents is gone. I read this one a few years after I Capture the Castle – 2001? 

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017)
Another dystopian novel but this time it’s about New York after the seas rise. The connection is dystopian climate change  I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it was the first I’d read by Robinson who’s been around a long time, writing and getting awards – like 40 years. I’d seen his name but …???

Brings me to an incredible nonfiction book called Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Valiant (2023)  which is about the enormous fire in the Boreal forests of Canada where we get our bitumen to make enormous quantities of synthetic crude oil. There’s a lot of nonfiction “meat” here, but It reads like a novel with the characters all trying to get out fast 
https://mybecky.blog/2023/07/20/fire-weather-by-john-vaillant-fire-weather/

And from a fire in northern Canada we go to a hurricane in southern Louisiana and find Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011). Not a fire this time, instead, this one is about a small, poor dysfunctional Black family and their struggles to escape and survive the horrendous storm and flooding brought on by Hurricane Katrina.  The family is not in a city which makes it rougher. Read in 2012 so I had to edit my blog.) 

For the 5th book in this chain of 6 Degrees I’ll chose Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke (2007). This is i the Dave Robicheaux seres which is set mostly in the Bayou area just  east of New Orleans.The crime mirrors the ferocity of the storms so this one has it all with the bodies in the wreckage of the storm along with the bodies and looting of the but there’s survivors. But there’s also great courage, kindness and love. I read this when I was between blogs.

And lastly – to bring us back to what is actually a somewhat less violent story (or less violently told anyway) we have White Doves at Morning (2002) by, again, James Lee Burke and mostly set in his home state of Louisiana. But rather than murder and mayhem amidst a 100-year hurricane – it’s the story of his ancestors, Robert Perry and Willie Burke, who settled there only to fight later in the Civil War,