Sure to be banned in Florida, and probably Tennessee as well.
5 stars
Content warning
mild spoilers about story arc
This is not an easy book. I had to take a break in the middle to read a T. Kingfisher comfort novel when I realized that things were just going to get more tragic.
In addition to being both scholarly and raging about issues of racial and environmental justice, the book is narratively ambitious. It wasn't always obvious to me where the various threads were going until they snapped together.
If you are looking for a book where the plucky protagonist triumphs over adversity, this is not the one. It is more a multilayered tragedy, where circumstances triumph over everyone in the end.
I finished listening to the audiobook, and can definitively say that this book was not meant for me.
I mean that in two very different ways:
First, this book definitely wasn't what I was expecting when I gave it a shot. It checks the post-apocalyptic sci-fi box, but neglects basically everything else on the list of what I was looking for at the time. That's not the fault of the author, but a fault of my expectations. This was a very literary read, and aside from the setting being sci-fi, this could basically have been a deep literary fiction read and I'd never question it. It's got a very large cast that tells their stories nonsequentially, and aside from some general character POV overlaps, doesn't really impact each other. There's also no real story exactly, nothing the story is working towards except to give each character the space to tell …
I finished listening to the audiobook, and can definitively say that this book was not meant for me.
I mean that in two very different ways:
First, this book definitely wasn't what I was expecting when I gave it a shot. It checks the post-apocalyptic sci-fi box, but neglects basically everything else on the list of what I was looking for at the time. That's not the fault of the author, but a fault of my expectations. This was a very literary read, and aside from the setting being sci-fi, this could basically have been a deep literary fiction read and I'd never question it. It's got a very large cast that tells their stories nonsequentially, and aside from some general character POV overlaps, doesn't really impact each other. There's also no real story exactly, nothing the story is working towards except to give each character the space to tell their own story about this irradiated Earth they live in. An incident happened, the world changed, and the haves went to space, and the have-nots stayed behind and lived (and died) as best they could. This book explores racial issues, climate issues, social issues, gentrification, and a whole host of topics that someone looking for a sci-fi read might not be expecting. In fact, that's basically the book in a nutshell--there's no larger story beyond it being a character piece.
Second, this book is meant for a point of view that I acknowledge I don't have. I've read many books in the past exploring racial issues from a variety of different angles, but this book in particular is fairly hostile in its tone. I didn't feel like this book was intended to solve the issues, gently bring everyone together, and speak some higher moral prose about working together to solve injustices. This book pulls no punches, makes its position very clear, and knows its audience. I'm not the audience the author seems to be going for, and at no point did I feel like I was welcome to try and understand. Which, fair, not all books are for all people.
So, even though I finished this book, I don't feel like I can properly give it a star rating, nor do I really know who I'd recommend it to. The writing is phenomenal, the audiobook had a ton of different narrators that really sold their parts, and there's really something here if you're looking for a literary view of social inequality. But I'd recommend passing on this if you're just looking for a sci-fi post-apocalyptic story.
