Anyone who writes a novel about environmental activists (a project I’ve tried myself) has to enlist the reader’s sympathy for people considered kooks, or terrorists, or dippy, tree-hugging hippies. As Richard Melo puts it in his novel about eco-saboteurs, JOKERMAN 8, “I myself have never heard a compelling logical explanation for the preservation of species. The species-decimation-leads-to-inevitable-apocalypse theories all ring hollow to me. The reasons we love & preserve species is spiritual & the spiritual defies tidy encapsulation in language. Do you know what I mean?”

Yes, I do. In the absence of compelling logical explanations, Melo goes to great lengths to make his band of merry eco-pranksters, a collective known as Jokerman 8, sympathetic. They are, in fact, the sweetest, most loving, most purely moral collection of characters on the planet. Born in the late sixties, they are heirs to all that’s best from that time: the belief in social change and the spirit of rock and roll. Guided by U2’s Joshua Tree album and haunted by the specter of Vietnam, the Jokerman 8 travel the world from their headquarters in Northern California. They sink whaling ships in Iceland, stop the slaughter of wolves in British Columbia, spike trees in old-growth forests in Oregon, and they never, ever hurt anybody.

—Alix Ohlin