altlovesbooks reviewed Karma of the Sun by Brandon Ying-Kit Boey
At the intersection of sci-fi and Buddhism, only meh is to be found
3 stars
I thought a weird mashup of post-apocalyptic Earth and Buddhism would somehow be more interesting than it ended up being. Don’t get me wrong, there’s stuff to like here, but the overall story never seemed to rise to the point where I got interested and engaged with what was going on.
Karma (yeah? yeahhh? get it???) is a boy growing up in a village on the post-apocalyptic Tibetan plateau. Six cataclysms happened a long time before (six suns) which changed the world drastically and killed the majority of the population. A prophesied seventh sun is foretold to be inevitable and will result in the remaining world to be destroyed (get used to this, the rhyme/prophecy for it is retold a lot throughout the course of the book). But to Karma, all of this is just a story, because he’s more concerned with his missing father, and the fact that his …
I thought a weird mashup of post-apocalyptic Earth and Buddhism would somehow be more interesting than it ended up being. Don’t get me wrong, there’s stuff to like here, but the overall story never seemed to rise to the point where I got interested and engaged with what was going on.
Karma (yeah? yeahhh? get it???) is a boy growing up in a village on the post-apocalyptic Tibetan plateau. Six cataclysms happened a long time before (six suns) which changed the world drastically and killed the majority of the population. A prophesied seventh sun is foretold to be inevitable and will result in the remaining world to be destroyed (get used to this, the rhyme/prophecy for it is retold a lot throughout the course of the book). But to Karma, all of this is just a story, because he’s more concerned with his missing father, and the fact that his uncle basically hates him for existing. He learns that there’s a way to avert this guaranteed calamity, if the lama child is found in time and brought to a mystical stone in a mountain, and his missing father may know where the mountain is to be found. So, familial duty being what it is, he’s off on this quest to find his father and the seeing stone which will, somehow, stop the world’s death.
It has all the makings of something I’d be into, and don’t get me wrong, the prose is fantastic, but the story itself never seemed to come together. There’s a lot of quiet philosophy in these pages, which made my post-apocalyptic romp a bit more tedious than I would have liked. Additionally, the actual action parts of the book were basically all the same–Karma gets captured by bandits, Karma escapes from bandits/is rescued from bandits/is released by bandits. Always the same bandit band too. I guess when you’re the last bandit band on Earth, you’re simultaneously the greatest band ever and the worst band ever. Not a lot of credentials needed. The ending also felt really rushed and especially confusing, which knocked off a star right there for me immediately. The majority of the book had careful, deliberate (see also: slow) pacing, but the ending is suddenly flying through events and revelations like the author had a page count limit thrown at him, and it just felt incredibly disjointed.
I don’t know, it’s an interesting concept and it was almost something great, but there was just not a lot of connection between me and what was going on at any given time.
