Being from Portland, I have heard the warnings about the big one in Cascadia and going through earthquakes in Los Angeles gives me a tiny bit of experience so I was primed to read what Emma Pattee imagined could happen to the City of Roses and to one heavily pregnant woman walking through the aftermath and aftershocks, in Tilt.
Annie is our guide through this landscape and at best she is real, in the sense that she is working through shit now and from the past in messy real-time. She is no hero, though her stamina is damn impressive throughout. But a lot of the time she is so annoyingly millennial.
Now I can live with that type of character in a novel but when the other main character is her husband Dom, who if you can’t tell by the name is a selfish ass who would not be as far as he is without Annie. Which, spoiler, ain’t that far. It makes a reader start looking for anyone to latch onto. For me, it was Taylor, the Ikea employee who is there at the start and then re-appears later. She has an arc and emotions to wrestle with. Or I could root for the earthquake.
It is a propulsive read and I liked the alternating chapters and the way the timelines came together and though some may not like the ending, I thought it was kinda inevitable and hit the mark. Overall, I was hoping for at least some revelation but I fear that Annie and Dom are still in Portland and stuck in their lives and in their heads.
For beer, instead of something specific, I would recommend s bit of a crawl through Portland’s Eastside beer haunts that you should check out like Belmont Station or Beermongers both excellent bottle shops and tap rooms that could easily provide an overview of Portland beer or you could swing by Living Haus beer which is right near the bridges that span the Willamette River that Annie is trying so hard to reach.
