BOY IN THE BLUE HAMMOCK

A dog and a teen boy seek safety after a civil war brings massive death.

Tao the dog regains consciousness in a house of horrors. Hauling himself upstairs on a badly injured leg, he sees that the Woman, Man, and Girl are all dead. The Reparation Party forces have rampaged through the house leaving alive only Tao and Kasper, the neuroatypical, cognitively disabled teenage son of the house. Tao and Kasper can’t communicate but must flee, so they begin a dreadful journey through a White-default city ravaged by civil war and filled with mutilated corpses (a fictionalized version of current post-pandemic politics ramped up to a genocidal extreme). It’s total victory for the racist, homophobic Reps, who repeatedly use a slur to refer to Kasper. The imagery-packed narration switches between Tao’s and Kasper’s points of view as well as that of an omniscient narrator who understands more than either. This moody piece about surviving in a war zone is kind and supportive of disabled Kasper, but it portrays him as barely human (though deserving of love). Many of his utterances are spelled phonetically, othering his communications, sapping his words of meaning, and contributing to the alien feeling of his overall portrayal. Tao, meanwhile, has a semimagical power and decent understanding of the situation; he’s the leader, the character with a growth arc, and, as he has the last word, he’s treated as more competent and understandable than the boy.

Well-intentioned but disturbing in its portrayal of the disabled protagonist.