Epic of Clair

Eric Charles Hansen's The Epic of Clair is a young-adult novel written in blank verse. Clair is a cross-country running star who suffers from the ailment of the age?anxiety. She lives in an alternate version of present-day Minnesota, where the recession of 2008 has led to a collapse of the oil economy. Urban society now survives through backyard gardens, barter, and a multicultural collectivism. She can no longer afford her prep school and the bank has foreclosed on her family home....
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Eric Charles Hansen's The Epic of Clair is a young-adult novel written in blank verse. Clair is a cross-country running star who suffers from the ailment of the age?anxiety. She lives in an alternate version of present-day Minnesota, where the recession of 2008 has led to a collapse of the oil economy. Urban society now survives through backyard gardens, barter, and a multicultural collectivism. She can no longer afford her prep school and the bank has foreclosed on her family home. Clair now suffers from panic attacks that make her head spin with vertigo, but discovers that running calms her condition. While running to the edges of her East St. Paul neighborhood, she finds that the suburbs around her are walled off to protect what is left of their gas and wealth. It?s as if time is moving in reverse, and feudal lords will rule again. But the suburbs lack the food they need and they have their eyes on the urban gardens of Clair?s neighborhood. A war is coming. Clair obtains work as a messenger from Mrs. Smith, who lives in a tower with a group of so-called witches (officially known as the Highland Ladies Garden Society). They offer to help Clair with her parents' foreclosure in exchange for her membership. The witches have long influenced business and public policy through passionate yet immaculate letter writing, the orchestration of seeming coincidences they call synchronicities, and occasional seduction. Among her adventures, Clair encounters a group of teenage wannabe vampires, a former punk-rock musician who has become a modern-day shaman, and a former classmate who is now a teenaged feudal lord and who wants to make Clair is queen. She also helps broker a defense treaty between ethnic groups around the Twin Cities to resist a suburban incursion. Among all this, Clair must overcome her anxiety and self-doubt to save the punk-rock sage, her fellow witches, and what she realizes has become a paradise in the old Persian sense of a great garden within walls.