Marissa Stapley is a writer, editor and creative writing instructor whose work has appeared in a range of publications including Elle, Lush, Today’s Parent and The Globe & Mail. She has also been a television spokesperson for Seventh Generation environmentally friendly products and a communications writer for Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Marissa is currently the editor of Elevate magazine and lives in Toronto with her husband (who good-naturedly indulges her intellectual crush on David Suzuki) and two preschoolers. She can push a double stroller and write in a notebook at the same time, and doesn’t own any sensible shoes.
Funny, insightful and playfully intelligent, Saving the World (in Sensible Shoes) is a refreshing mixture of commercial women’s fiction with an environmental conscience. Think Emma by Jane Austin meets The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, or Helen Fielding’s debut Cause Celeb mixed with the poignant environmentalism of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Prodigal Summer.
Rhiannon O’Shea is an eco-justice intern who doesn’t fit in anywhere: she’s not a vegan, nor is she a socialite (never mind the grandparents with the Park Avenue penthouse or the handsome oil heir suitor she’s not falling in love with). She’s also not a particularly good intern, and begins to lose focus on her legal career dreams as she toils under the disinterested eye of her eco-fascist boss and starts to fall for the charms of the devastatingly handsome (or perhaps just devastating) Beau Chevalier. Rhiannon is sent to the arctic to work with a legal team and a group of biodiversity scientists intent on saving beluga whales from the perils of offshore oil drilling. Rhiannon is thrilled with her new role as whale warrior—until she learns her chief adversary is Beau. And his intern is his girlfriend. The one she didn’t know he had.
In Inuvik, Rhiannon discovers a bleak yet strangely beautiful and inspiring town built on melting permafrost. While she struggles to avoid Beau and present arguments to an alarmingly biased judge, the town residents struggle with the realities of climate change, the forces of the oil industry—and a vegetarian polar bear who keeps breaking into the community greenhouse. Then she discovers the fledgling oil company she and her team are taking on is co-owned by her grandfather. Two worlds collide and Rhiannon ends up begging, bribing, and eventually jailed for contempt of court. She also gets fired.
In a book about finding your path in a world full of forked roads, then turfing it all to believe the unbelievable—and finally, about dressing for success and accessorizing for survival—Rhiannon gathers her strength and finds a way to save the whales, change her life and find renewed hope for the future.
