Future Home of the Living God

Was going to give this book 2.5/3 stars but the last line was so epic it bumped it way up to 4. It really hit me hard.

There's a lot to like about this book. I like the premise and the language and all the philosophical sciencey gibberish, but something about the main character just didn't connect with me at all. Maybe because she was two things I've never been nor wanted to be: religious and pregnant. But I've read all sorts of books about people completely different from me that I connected to. That's kinda the point of books. There was also a big part of her story that I do share with her: we're both adopted. But that was maybe the part of the story that fell the most flat for me. Her reuniting with her birth mother just felt so matter-of-fact and was described in philosophical rather than emotional terms. I had the hardest time feeling her emotions in the moments that I have the most personal experience with, which is weird.

There's also the fact that especially near the end this book kept focusing on the mystical bond between mother and fetus and between women (more accurately people with uteri but that's not acknowledged in the book) solely because of their ability to have babies. There's literally a "women's song" that all women instinctively know and only women sing. I could handle all the Catholic stuff the main character went on about because I find the reasons that people are drawn to religion fascinating and there was a critical eye towards people using religion to exploit vulnerable people in times of crisis, but I can't stand all that women's intuition crap. I'm particularly surprised because the author was critical of the way white people assume that Native people are "closer to nature". Doesn't she see how both ideas that Native people have a mystical connection to the land and that women "just know" are part of the same ideology that says that white men are superior because of their better ability to "reason" and "think rationally" while placating marginalised groups with stories about how we're superior to them in some "lesser" form of knowledge? I feel like I must have missed something and have been trying to come up with excuses like maybe the women's song bit is a sign that she's giving into the cult that's using these narratives to exploit women but I've read it over a few times and it happens very literally and she has thoughts like these earlier on, particularly in relation to just knowing things about her fetus, so I don't know.

This is especially disappointing because the author clearly knows a lot about science and is very invested in it. As a biologist who loves sci-fi I've gotten very good at suspension of disbelief. It doesn't matter to me if the cause of the apocalypse isn't biologically possible if the story and characters are compelling and it gives me a fun thought experiment of "wait, would that be biologically possible?" In this case the apocalypse is that suddenly all animals including humans start having offspring that are going "backwards" evolutionarily. Is that possible? No. But the author clearly knows this and spends some time explaining that there is no linear "forwards" or "backwards" in evolution which is miles better than most people's understanding of evolution. And she also throws in all these asides on different sciencey things about rocks and stars and fetal development with faffy philosophical musings and I'm just a sucker for that stuff even if it is ultimately kinda meaningless to the story.

But the fact that she dwells so much on actual science means that the things that don't make sense bother me more. For example, this "devolution" has only been happening for a few months when the main character sees a saber-toothed cat kill and eat a Labrador. This confused me because modern big cats take around 2 years to reach their full size and hunt on their own. It bothered me so much I had to look it up and scientists think Smilodon took 3 years to reach their full size so there's no way this cat could have been born only a few months ago and is now on its own and hunting large dogs. This really took me out of the story and I couldn't stop thinking about how since it's in Minnesota its mother must have been a cougar and would a cougar recognise a saber-toothed cub as her own and if she did would she be able to teach the cub to hunt? They have very different teeth which must mean different hunting styles as I don't think a saber-tooth could latch on to prey with its teeth the way a cougar does to subdue it. Maybe it could learn to hunt small prey but a Lab is pretty big, bigger than a cougar at 6 months old and most likely bigger than a Smilodon at 6 months, and so on. These kinds of mistakes aren't usually a big problem for me as they're fun to think about but there was so much accurate science that it stood out and took me out of the story a bit.

So overall I guess if the main character's philosophising had been balanced with a bit more emotionality and if it hadn't all turned into this big pregnant-women-having-a-psychic-connection thing at the end I would have really liked this book. And as I said that last line really hit home.

Louis Erdrich has been enthralling me with her stories ever since I was little and reading The Game of Silence and The Birchbark House. This book is no different. her ability to grip the reader while still weaving lyricism through her prose is amazing. after the first read, I know I would have to read it again to fully understand all of the ideas woven into this book, but I do know she is incredibly talented and the book is worth reading again and again. I would 100% recommend this book to anyone.