The Book of Koli

M. R. Carey imagines a distant future resulting from humans' attempts at genetically engineering trees to grow faster in order to cope with global warming and environmental degradation: the trees get the taste for blood. They learn to hunt and trap both animals and humans. The forests become dangerous places where humans can only venture on cloudy days when the trees move more slowly.

This is the world of Koli. A world where people almost never leave the village in which they are born, and where occasional remnants of the technological wonders built centuries past can confer amazing power on the holder of the "tech", as they call it. Koli is just a boy in love at the beginning of the story, a foolish boy who is well-intentioned but also rather selfish at times. His virtues are that he truly does not wish to cause anyone harm. That's kind of it. I have seen other reviewers calling this a turnoff, but I quite enjoyed the turnabout of having a tale of adventure starring a boy, becoming a man, who succeeds in his quests because he is kind, soft-hearted, and sensitive.

Another complaint I have seen is about "bad grammar." This, I think, is more apparent if you read rather than listen to the book. I have only taken it in as an audiobook and the narrator is excellent, and the "bad grammar" makes perfect sense when spoken aloud. Carey is simply trying to put the reader into Koli's illiterate mind, and set the scene of a distant future with language drift over time. Try the audiobook if that sort of thing bothers you, because really: it is a fantastic story.

First, thank you to NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I had a hard time settling on a rating for this book, because my personal hangup with it is probably easily overlooked by someone else. To get the good out of the way first, the premise is extremely interesting. Here you have Koli, this country village bumpkin living within his little bubble of what he knows in what is soon revealed to be a dystopian, post-apocalyptic England. His life gets upended at some point (maybe a little further along than I would have liked) through a well-meaning but ultimately misguided attempt to acquire some "tech", and he finds himself on quite a little adventure. The plot is fun, intense in places, and a little thought-provoking in others.

To touch on the bad, first and foremost, the book is written from the viewpoint of this uneducated country boy, with all the narrating baggage that implies. Descriptions are sometimes hard to follow because Koli doesn't always have the words to describe what he's seeing. Intentionally bad grammar abounds, because the book takes the form of him relating his adventures to you as a story. Things were also told a bit out of order in the beginning because Koli would start to relate something to you, or insinuate something, and then backtrack from it with lines akin to "but I need to tell you this first before I tell you that". It was mildly annoying to read, at times. I also feel like some of the thought-provoking parts about civilization gone astray were heavy handed in places. Finally, the beginning sort of drags. It takes about half the book before Koli finally gets his call to action and the plot starts picking up.

So, summarizing, I ended up giving this a 3.5/5, because I had a hard time getting through the writing style to the meat underneath (maybe I'm a shallow person), and because the beginning felt like it dragged on a bit long.