Early ReviewersToby LeBlanc

One word describes Louisiana fifty years from now after climate change intensifies: Soaked.

A nearly silent Cajun man is the last speaker of Louisiana French but doesn't know what he is saying. A Vietnamese woman recovering from the trauma of war looks for home in a hurricane. A farmer gambles his inherited land on the best marijuana Louisiana has ever known. Laughing in the face of oblivion, lending a hand to the hopeless, adapting in spite of tragedy, and enduring when everything else is gone, is what the people of Louisiana, Toby LeBlanc's people, do best.

"A fully imagined and always surprising take on life along the Gulf of Mexico fifty years and many disasters from now. Yet people-and the old spirit of Louisiana-endure." —MIKE TIDWELL, author of Bayou Farewell

"In these nine brilliant short stories, the Cajuns of southern Louisiana have found their George Orwell. LeBlanc has created vivid, complex, unforgettable characters that come to life on the page. It is great writing, and while these tales are timely, they may well become, like Orwell's 1984, timeless." —Joel Lafayette Fletcher III, author of With Hawks and Angels

"LeBlanc plumbs the depths of human nature, questioning whether people can actually change and, if they can, what is lost or saved in the process. A call for people to wake up to the realities of climate change, but to also never forget how to dream, Soaked is a collection that sings out its accented regional voice to speak with readers everywhere." —Joshua Myers,  The Indiana Academy

About the Author

Toby LeBlanc is the author of Dark Roux (2022). His writing has appeared in Barrelhouse Magazine, Deep South Magazine, The Writing District, and Coffin Bell Journal, among others. He was born in Southern Louisiana and currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Dark Roux is the story of a family simmering on the verge of burning to ruin. The delicate nature of this sauce depicts how Cajun culture survives Americanization along parade routes and swamps in South Louisiana. The Mouton family approaches Mardi Gras 1999 expecting traditional joy and release. But teenage struggles with sexual orientation and independence, the ambiguity of young love complicated by the racism of the South, motherhood leaving little room to love one's self (even when two non-family women are waiting to help), and blind ambition as a way to deal with the past, all plague the family. The lines tying them together become taut, threatening to fail and toss them into the hurricane of the future.