BookBrowse Reviews Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth

BookBrowse:

With an eclectic cast of characters and distinct style, Deb Olin Unferth's latest novel makes a brilliant case for living in the moment—even if Earth and humanity are past the point of saving.

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Earth 7 begins after the end of the world. Our planet has experienced a devastating wave of "depopulation" amid environmental catastrophe, and the last humans left must respond to it. Those responses vary: some choose to settle Mars; some seek to load their minds onto microchips; others try to preserve as much of Earth as they can, in the hope that some future civilization can bring it back to life. When the story begins, Dylan Stein's scientist mother, Rosemary, is laser-focused on the latter—at the cost of connecting with her own child.

Rosemary Stein removes herself and her daughter (whom she initially calls "XY," finding names to be one of many unnecessary add-ons to the human experience) to an isolated pod in the ocean, where she can focus without distraction on coming up with a new way to preserve "traces" of Earth lifeforms. This is, as you might imagine, not a great way to raise a family. As Dylan grows up, she seeks to escape their seafloor suburb by any means necessary, from cajoling her mother to catfishing a Martian with promises of groundbreaking research. After the Martian gambit fails, she's hopeless. Until one day, Rosemary hands her a one-way ticket:

"But she did get away. Not on that day but another. That's how these things work. You buck and buck, and then, with your weakest, most exhausted kick, the gate swings open. Why did it open now and not before? (Was it unlocked all along?) No matter, you escaped. It doesn't usually solve much. But you don't know that yet. All you know is that your mother changed her mind."

Both mother and daughter get the escape they want—from people, from the pod. But, like the novel only starting after it's too late to save Earth, the most exciting changes in Dylan's life happen after she achieves her goal, and her journey is laid out in the sharp, evocative style that makes Deb Olin Unferth a master of the craft. The use of "you" to bring the reader right into the story, the choice to cover a long span of years using just the handful of moments that matter most, and her endlessly fascinating, complex characters: this is Unferth's best work yet. Read it, read it again, and read it out loud.

Surfacing from the ocean, Dylan is feeling triumphant, motion sick, and totally lost. What now? She winds up taking an internship at Rosemary's old research lab in the desert, but finds working inside and with others a baffling task. Despite her desperation to connect with people while she was inside the pod, she's overwhelmed with the reality of it, and spends as much time as she can outside the compound observing the desert sand. "Earth 7 will transform the way you think about sand" might not be a great back-cover blurb, but it's true.

It may also transform the way you think about humanity. Rosemary and Dylan aren't the only characters to achieve their goals and wonder what comes next—we also meet Martian settlers who dream of returning to Earth, a death cultist with last-minute regrets, and Melanie. Melanie is a resort bartender at "Vacationland for Singles (terraform area .0469)" who has plastic skin and a bevy of health worries from a series of invasive, experimental surgeries to prevent aging. Melanie lets the resort guests assume she's a robot. "Meanwhile, Dylan knew. Of course she knew. She figured it all out on the second day. Too late, she was already in love." If you, like me, are still looking for a guidebook for being a person (did everyone else get it delivered?) you will adore the relationships in this book.

Earth 7 takes a hard look at what it means to be alive and experience the world, and asks what really matters. What survives us? The scientists racing to preserve samples of wooly mammoth DNA might have one answer for that, but Unferth provides another. Our connections to one another matter, human connections. This is a love story—not just about Dylan and Melanie, as beautiful as their story is, but about the love between child and mother, between a scientist and their subject, between Earth and life. "I am surprised by the long tether of family," a later message from Dylan's mother confesses. "There are sixty-four kinds of ownership states and different shades of each, not all of them detrimental, as I once thought… No matter how far in distance and time from you I am, the string doesn't fray or thin. It strengthens."

In a future where Earth is dead and humanity dying, Deb Olin Unferth's prose is alive, and reminds you to take stock of the planet and community we have now. True survival lies not in racing to defy nature, but in embracing what's in front of us, and truly caring for one another—no matter how hopeless it may seem, or how robotic we claim to be. Earth 7 is a novel fiercely in love with imperfect life. Read it to fall in love with yours.

This review first ran in the June 24, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.