Prior to page 52 (and although that was the page when my catharsis finally solidified, it had been slowly building since page 1. It always takes about fifty pages to really understand what the subject of a novel is. Normally by then, Aztec aliens have already sucked the brains of half our world leaders and are turning their attentions to the main character, and you think "oh, this is what I'm reading!") it was Dean's humorous approach that fixed me on her words. Her dialogue chimes the kind of truth you hear in diners and coffee shops rather than in literature, and her effervescent wit keeps the impending gut-wrenching global precipice at bay. You feel almost relaxed, even while being constantly reminded that the floor will soon drop out from under you and into a reigning pit of hellfire. Nice, huh?

You follow Carina's journey into motherhood as it is mirrored by her similar journey into the new mega-corporation, Malsapo, creating a dichotomy that surrounds Carina and her husband, Pato. The angelic face of new life sits on one side of Carina's heart, while the demon giant pulls her from the other. In this way, Dean approaches 2012 from a profoundly human perspective, approaching its myths with a practical regard for the present. Carina, faced with the possibility of the approaching end-of-days if forced to reconsider her typical American life in a new light. In this way, her story is much like Noah's as he is promised of the coming flood. Does she take heed, and build her arc? Or does she join in with the others and laugh it off.

"The Apothecary's Song" is poignant and smart. Her prose doesn't limit itself to considering the way 2012 will come about, but widens its scope to the why. Her story is full of oddities in league with the everyday and mundane, the commonalities that we forget to consider, oh, and lots and lots of frogs. Her final question posits the reader in a position opposite of that of any other 2012 fiction I've read, leaving us to consider life rather than death. Did it really take the end of civilization for us to realize what it was worth in the first place? Kimbriel Dean suggest that this the question we should have been asking all along, not whether or not 2012 is a real phenomenon or not, but instead whether we will make the time we have left worth having. It's a question that looks passed the myth, and sees the truth instead, a sign of true literary value and relevance, and worthy of anybody's time to read.