In 2070, the year Evangeline Renee Pelletier turns sixteen, gigantic storms leave much of the East and Gulf coasts uninhabitable. Drought, food shortages lead to vast human migrations, a frightened populace and a government that is out for blood.

Evangeline, called Ren, is a budding poet whose emotions are laid bare in her verses. She has an ‘old soul’ and longs for the days when her Arcadian ancestors lived off the land. A voice for her generation, she bemoans the loss of a past she never experienced and worries about a future nobody can predict. She is brave, resourceful and vulnerable entering adulthood without any idea who she might become.

Solange Chabot is thirteen years old. Her family has fled the bayous of Louisiana and landed in an immigrant encampment on the Maine border with Canada. Bullied by peers who call her Souffle Solange, she is an inveterate reader with a sharp mind. Her uncle Dennis is the wanted member of a violent cult called The Chosen. This marks him as a target for a local family of bounty hunters, Ren Pelletier’s family.

BROIL is sixteen-year-old Ren’s quest for sanity and reason in a world that is unraveling. She has just lost her older adored sister AJ to the violence. Now Solange enters her life in a most unpredictable way. Together, this unlikely duo join with Ren’s family on a bounty that leads them south into the heart of chaos looking for the most prized bounty of all: a former president of the United States.

BROIL is the tale of two girls trying to salvage a dream they can’t fully believe in. Can their world be made whole and healthy again? Whom can they trust? Cloud, a drug that brings memories to life? Government leaders who deny their own guilt? Themselves, two girls entering womanhood looking for a direction that may not exist?

In a world that may have no future, somewhere Acadie, the land of Ren’s forebears, must exist. Or something like it. For as she promises in one of her poems:

‘Sing then, my dear, to theirs and yours

That hope there may yet be.

While others have forgotten.

I remember Acadie.’